


Gunsmoke and Blades

by SkirtWithAWeapon



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 06:47:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10551868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkirtWithAWeapon/pseuds/SkirtWithAWeapon
Summary: Opal, the sole survivor of Vault 111, hired big-talking MacCready to watch her back while she continued to learn to navigate what the world had become, two centuries after the bombing.  After the two share a hot blooded one night stand, they become inseparable, and a force to contend with.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic began as a set of one-offs that eventually took off on its own. It contains elements of various canon/in-game quest and storylines, as such, could be spoiler-ish. My first return to fanfiction since writing out of Fallout 3, and the first to include the context, setting, etc. of Fallout 4. Any and all feedback is welcome!

The sun was setting in The Fens and it was quieter than usual.  The entire area always seemed saturated with aggressive beings, from the psychotic raiders, to the evangelical super mutants, to the mindless feral ghouls, and the air crackled with the sounds of gunfire and assorted screams.  That evening, though, as Opal and MacCready wound through the ruins, the only din to be heard was the crunch of their boots on the ground in a steady and rhythmic patter, and the soft _flop flop flop_ of MacCready’s tattered duster as it flapped against the back of his legs.  They had spent the better part of the day clearing out the Boston Public Library of its super mutant infestation, as commissioned by Daisy, and the pair were slightly bruised, hungry, and ready to call it a day.

A gentle breeze shifted the hair on Opal’s forehead, cooling her skin beneath her matted, sweat soaked bangs.  She had removed her armoured helmet for the night shortly after they had left the library, but most of her hair was still damp from the physical exertion required in surviving the mutant extermination part of the mission.  By reflex, she took a deep breath into her nostrils, and immediately regretted it. Post-war Boston had a smell that she did not seem to be able to get used to -- some kind of horrific combination of metal, gunsmoke, burning plastic, rotting garbage, and piss -- no matter how many hours, or days, or weeks it had been since she left the Vault.  

 _Has it been weeks, already?_ she pondered, idly.  Her daydream was broken by the crunch and squelch of MacCready smashing the head of a mutant roach, a sound that was unusually loud in the unusual quiet.

“Ha, ha!  Did you see the splatter on that one?” he chuckled.  “Not a single drop of roach gunk on me, either.”

“Mmhmm,” Opal hummed, hardly breaking her stride.

“It takes a certain _finesse_ to pull off the murder of some wildlife without getting something on you.  Especially anything insect-like.  Those damn things seem to be nothing but ooze on the inside.”

Opal nodded in response to her companion’s braggadocio and said nothing else.  She was still coping with the overwhelming emotions that accompanied visiting places she knew two centuries ago – really, merely weeks ago, as far as her memory was concerned.  She was navigating a world that was as familiar as the back of her hand, and as foreign as the dark side of the moon.  It was unsettling, and weighed on her heavier and heavier with every completed mission.

The distant rumble of thunder signified an incoming storm. Opal wasn’t yet used to how quickly radiation storm cells blew in and bore down, either, though it made sense that total nuclear annihilation would have changed the planetary climate forever. Her shoulders slumped at the thought of slogging the final few kilometers in the rain, and suddenly she felt very tired. “Over here,” she directed, veering off their trajectory and towards a grey brick building with a green door.  It was the only building on the current block that seemed to still have four walls and its roof.

MacCready drew up to the door and leaned his head toward the crack between the door itself and the frame.  Both were silent as he listened.  Finally he looked at Opal, shrugged, held his sniper rifle in his right hand and turned the doorknob with his left.  The door creaked as it opened and Opal squinted to make out anything in the dark room.  A small, ancient camping lantern glowed in the far corner and was the only source of light in the room, but that didn’t stop Opal’s memory banks from firing on all cylinders.

_This was it. This was the law office that accepted me to complete my articling.  I was supposed to start in the new year._

“Hey.  Hey! Opal?  You still with me?” MacCready called, tapping her on the elbow with the butt of his rifle.  “I’ve never seen such a deep déjà vu look on you.”

“Yeah.  I mean, I, this is, I just –“ she stammered, mumbling, unable to form a complete thought.

The rustling of rotting flesh climbing over the ruined receptionists’ desk snapped both travellers back to their situation. Seeing the feral ghoul in that place, at that moment, caused a sudden, irrational rage to flare up and explode. MacCready had barely lifted his rifle when Opal was on the feral.  She deftly avoided the feral’s savage swipe towards her, dug her left hand into the ghoul’s rotting scalp, and with a smooth motion stabbed the sharpened steel of her bladed brass knuckles into its chest, pulled them out, then slashed its throat.  Putrid fluids sprayed from its wounds and the feral screeched, its body beginning to tremble uncontrollably.  Opal snarled, her hand still entrenched in the feral’s deteriorating scalp, and rushed towards the door.  MacCready took a dramatic step out of the way and watched as she flung the feral out the door, then slammed it shut, tight.  She turned back into the room, crossed the floor once more, and began to drag the ancient desk to turn it into a barricade.

“Do you mind?” she barked.  MacCready jumped and immediately took the other side of the desk. They turned it on its side so its surface was against the door proper.  Still feeling angry, Opal kicked the desk, turned, and flopped onto the floor in front of it, holding her knees up to her chest.

Neither person spoke for a moment.  MacCready idly walked around the room, making a point of checking for any other present hostiles, though they both knew any other threats would have showed up during the commotion with the first.  Opal merely sat where she was.  She could feel her heart rate returning to normal, and her breathing slowed as well, as the adrenaline drained from her veins back to standard levels.  The wind had picked up and rain could be heard beginning to pelt the boarded windows.

Eventually, MacCready had circled back to Opal’s impromptu fort, flicking a pen he found into the air and catching it with the same hand.  He stood in front of her for a moment, before catching the pen a final time and kneeling down to look her in the eyes.  “What’s the matter, slugger?  Wanna talk about it?”  He used an adorable, yet deliberately teasing tone, like a father character in a cheesy children’s film.

Opal tried her hardest to remain stonewall.  “Fuck off.”

“Come on, now, _language_ , young lady.  What’s eating you?  Let’s talk about it, then I’ll take you down to the pharmacy for a malted milkshake.”

Opal giggled in spite herself.  “Where ever would you have learned to talk like that?”

“Aha, so the pre-war chick is _impressed_ after all!  I figured.”  MacCready nodded, satisfied with himself, then sat down next to her.  He pulled the strap of his sniper rifle up over his head and set the gun next to him, stretching his feet out in front of his body and leaning back onto his hands.  “To answer your question, back when I was a kid in Little Lamplight, the bus that was ruined or crashed or whatever, had a video holotape that still worked.  It got jammed in the school bus audio visual system and would only play on it there, so once a week we’d all gather together on that broken bus and watch it.”  He tilted his head back and sighed.  “It was a terrible film.  Most of the kids were sick of it by the time they had turned eight, but it brought some kind of consistency, some kind of normalcy, to how we lived there.  The movie was about a kid who wanted to be on a little league team and was awful at baseball. His dad helped him practice and wouldn’t you know it, he made the team as their top pick.”

Opal picked at a speck of dirt on her knee.  “A lot of movies were formulaic like that.  Soft topics, feel-good endings.  We were living in a time of world war, and people wanted some kind of light hearted escape, I guess.”

“That explains a lot of the plot holes and terrible acting.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not what set you off just now, though.”

Opal didn’t reply.  Her stomach fluttered as she tried to even wrap her own head around what caused her sudden rage and violent outburst.  Her mind was scattered in a million different directions and emotions. “Um,” was all she managed.

MacCready flipped the pen in the air again, caught it, then offered it to Opal.  “Maybe we start here.  ‘The Law Firm of Milton and Stonechurch.’”

Opal took the proffered pen and stared at the faded, but discernable, writing on the side of the branded stationary.  “Oh,” she sighed.

“Did you work here?  Did the husband?  What happened, just now?  And let me take this opportunity to say that I am _extremely_ glad you are on my side.”  He paused.  “Not that I _ever_ doubted your abilities.” He paused, again.  “…ma’am.”

Opal punched him in the arm, then flung the pen back into the depths of the dark room.  It landed with a light, hollow plastic clatter.  The rain was pouring against the windows by then, and thunder was rumbling regularly.  “I had a law degree but I hadn’t completed the requirements to actually practice as a lawyer.  My husband had come back from his deployment and we had the baby…but I’d applied here to complete my articling.  They accepted.  I would have started in the new year.”

MacCready absently knocked his feet together as he listened. “The war changed everything, for everyone.”

“Yes.  It did.” The two brooded on the gravity of the topic for a moment.  Opal felt herself feeling angry, once more.  “I…just got so mad, Mac.  I don’t know how to live in this world.  The war, and the Vault – so much of my life has been moulded by the decisions of other people, people who had so much power, and…”  She trailed off.  MacCready watched her as she spoke, but didn’t offer anything right away.

Opal sighed and began to unlatch her armour off her arms. “I feel like I’m living a double life. I’m walking through these streets and my memory screams with one version of them, but my reality is something totally different.  We clear out places like the library, today, and I know it like the back of my hand – but it’s not _that_ library, not anymore, and…and, it’s just jarring.  Every single time.”

MacCready merely nodded.

“And I just get…mad.  I’m mad that people in power bombed the shit out of us, and that the Vault duped us, and that the library and historical buildings and even small offices got destroyed, or that they’re overtaken by people, or _things_ , that have no regard for what those places _mean_ , and…and…”

MacCready nodded again.  “Come ‘ere.”

Opal turned to see he was patting the floor next to him. “What?”

“I said ‘come here,’ dummy.”

Opal furrowed her brow, then slid herself over next to MacCready.  He took her hand and squeezed it tight.  She felt her shoulders relax and realized she had hunched them in her emotional outburst. He had never offered tenderness like this, before, and she was pleasantly surprised by his embrace.  He smelled like gunpowder, stale cigarettes, and sweat, and yet, she found it warm and comforting.

_Face it – suspended animation aside, it really has been two hundred years since you got a damn hug._

“You’re right, you know,” he mumbled.

“What do you mean?”

“Ass—I mean, jerk heads in power caused this horrible mess, with so much collateral damage, and where are they now?  I mean, most of them are probably dead, but…but, you’re right.  They made this huge mess, and what about the rest of us?  I was born into this, so I don’t know any different, but you?  I can hardly imagine.”

Opal nodded and found herself nestling closer into his chest.  She could hear his heartbeat.  It had started beating faster.

“There was this one time, some years ago, I went back to Little Lamplight.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  I guess I was feeling homesick and thought it'd be good to see the place again, see the old gang.”

He paused.  Opal listened to the rain, and MacCready’s heartbeat, and found both sounds soothing.  He began to stroke her hair.  She wondered if he realized he was doing it, but enjoyed the touch and didn’t ask him to stop.

“We get there, and it’s bittersweet.  I’m happy that it mostly looked the same, but it was also just totally different.  I didn’t recognize anyone, there, and maybe what’s worse…heh, it sounds stupid now, but I was kind of upset they didn’t know _me._  Hadn’t even heard of me – and I had been mayor for six years!  I ran the place!  I’d only been gone for four years, since, and…well.”  He sighed and wrapped his arm around Opal tight.  “I know it’s not the same, but I’m trying to say, you’re not as crazy as you feel.”

“Mm.  Thanks,” she replied.

“You’re still pretty crazy, though.”

“Asshole.”

“The worst.”

They sat quietly in their embrace for a little longer, listening to the thunder, wind, and rain.  The lantern at the other end of the room glowed diligently.  Opal’s eyes had finally fully adjusted and she could see the stairwell that had been at the back of the room was completely caved in. _Oh, well.  Less temptation to go hunting for further nostalgia._  She shifted slightly to look up at MacCready and ask him something, but completely forgot what it was when she saw the way he was looking back at her.  Opal caught her breath in her mouth, and closed her eyes just as he leaned down and kissed her.  She kissed back, reaching up and cradling his cheek in her hand.

He released and gently touched his forehead to hers. Opal blinked and softly pulled her head back.  “Ah,” she began, but stopped.

MacCready opened his eyes and pulled his head back, as well.  “Oh. Oh!  Oh, no, I…I’m sorry.  I didn’t…ah, shit.  Shoot! I meant, shoot.”

Opal blinked again, this time in confusion. “Huh?  What’s wrong?”

“I shouldn’t have just done that.  I’m not _like_ that – that’s a scumbag raider thing to do.  I really should have asked.  I…oh damn, I just…I only ever had the one serious girlfriend, and –“

His stuttering was endearing.  She smiled, seeing the typically cocky MacCready reduced to an awkward, mumbling mess.  “Shut up. I feel it, too.”

“Oh, thank _GOD_ ,” he sighed in relief, pulling her closer once more.  “I worried I was going to join that feral you slaughtered. Which, I guess, would be a pretty honourable way to die.  If I was into that garbage.”

“Shut up,” Opal repeated, reaching with both hands the second time to pull MacCready’s face closer to hers and meet their lips together.  His fingers explored her back and systematically unlatched the rest of her armour.  Her body felt lighter and more relaxed as her chest piece fell off her body, and MacCready discarded it from between them.  His kiss was awkward and more wet than Opal would normally enjoy, but it was good enough and caused her body to tingle all over.   _It’s been too long._

She reached down and ran her fingers underneath his duster, pushing out and working the jacket off his body.  He shifted his arms to shed the layer, broke their kiss, and instead kissed down her cheek and neck while fumbling for the zipper on her modified vault suit.  Opal closed her eyes and sighed, feeling her face becoming flush with the intensified physical contact, then reached her own hand up and unzipped her suit from the front.

“Oh.  So that’s where that is,” MacCready mumbled.  He flicked her hand off the zipper and finished opening it all the way down her body with his teeth.  She giggled, a reaction to how silly, but fun, the action had been.  He began to pull the suit off each of her legs, then ran his hands slowly back up her body, along her torso, gently past her breasts, to rest on her shoulders.  He positioned himself to straddle her hips and leaned down so that their faces were very close.  Opal closed her eyes, anticipating another kiss, but he spoke, instead.  “There’s something that I have always found really alluring about a woman who kicks ass and takes no bullshit from anyone.”

“Language,” she breathed, teasingly.

“The kids have long gone to bed by now,” he purred, working towards releasing first her left arm from the vault suit, and then the right.  She shivered reflexively, her skin completely exposed to the air, still clammy in some places.  He took her shiver as a cue to press his body closer onto hers, kissing her deeply, both hands in her hair.

Opal reached down and unhooked his belt, then the button on his waistband, and finally pulled down the zipper.  Her tongue pushed into his mouth, and he sighed in response before meeting it with his own.  Her hands pinched his waistband on both sides and tugged them down, a little harder than she had intended.  His boxer shorts caught onto his pants and came down at the same time, catching onto his erection.  He instantly broke their kiss to exclaim his surprise, and Opal laughed in her embarrassment.

“Sorry,” she squeaked.  “I guess I’m out of practice.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” was MacCready’s swift reply.  Opal wasn’t completely sure what that meant, but it didn’t matter by that point.  He was already doing her the favour of shimmying out of his trousers and chased that with pulling off his shirt as well.

Opal gasped at the sight of a haggard, x-shaped scar beneath the right side of his ribcage.  MacCready blinked and followed her gaze.  “Oh, forgot about that.  Brought a gun to a knife fight, once, but the fight had started before I knew I was in it.”

“Jesus,” she hissed.

“You think that’s bad, you should see my other scars.” Before Opal could reply, he had kissed her again, and started grinding his crotch on hers.

Opal moaned and felt herself tingle and become wet between her legs.  His body was warm and moved in the perfect way to cause her to become aroused. MacCready was everything she needed, right then – perhaps had been for a while – and she trembled in the anticipation.

“Mmm,” he purred, pulling from their kiss and nuzzled her cheek.  MacCready laid directly on top of her, then, and leaned down to kiss down her neck once more.  Opal caught a whiff of his hair, with his head so close to hers.  It smelled sun baked, reminding her of warmer, better days.  He worked his hands down her body and slipped them gently beneath her loose bra to caress her breasts and rub her nipples, eliciting yet another moan from her lips.  She closed her eyes and arced her head back in all the pleasures of his body and touch. Opal reached up and traced her hands down his back, curious if she’d find any of those other scars he mentioned. Suddenly, she felt his teeth on his neck as he bit her flesh, and her response was to arch her back and sigh.

MacCready murmured into her ear.  “Amazing.”  With a swift movement, he pulled his hands out of her bra and was yanking his own boxers off.  The lighting was far too poor for Opal to see anything going on, but as he leaned down to undress her the same, she felt his erection against her pelvis and the wet drip from its head.  She reached down instinctively to rub that drip around the tip and relished the pleased shudder it elicited from its owner.

He leaned his face down one last time and kissed her soundly on the lips.  Opal hummed and kissed back, then gasped as he stunned her by taking a fist full of her hair in his right hand, tightly, and pushed himself inside of her with a violent thrust she had not expected at all.  He grunted as well, paused, and thrust again.

“Ahhh,” escaped her lips, a combination of the surprise and the simultaneous pleasure, sensation, wetness, and warmth of his cock inside of her.

MacCready pulled her hair so her head was arced back once again, and she sighed in response.  “Seems I’m calling all the shots, now.”  He thrust again.  “This is pretty good.”  Again. “I could get used to this.”  And again.

“Dream on, asshole,” she breathed, grinning.  Opal reached up, wrapping her arms around his back, and met his rhythm.

He slapped her on the cheek, causing her to yelp in both the surprise and the sting.  He reached down with his left hand and lifted her right leg so that it was bent up and around his body.  Opal gasped as the shifted angle caused him to pound her deeper, while the muscles in her leg yelled out their displeasure in the position.  MacCready did not let up.  Instead, he began to thrust harder and heavier, banging her head against the bottom of the desk and showing her a stamina she would never have imagined. He was pushing deeper than she had ever experienced – almost too deep to really be pleasurable – but it had been so long, and he felt too good on and inside her, otherwise, she found herself enjoying the sexual activity and moaning and sighing without even meaning to.

“Shut you up good, finally, didn’t I?” he breathed between grunts.  “Holy fuck, this is amazing.”  He gripped her hair tight once more, and she cried out.  “Oh God, yes, oh _yes_.”

Opal dug her nails into his back, feeling pushed hard beneath his body as though she could barely move.  Nathan had never, ever, been this rough with her, and the experience wasn’t just new, it was fantastic.  She hurt in strange places, but couldn’t get enough of the sex, either.  “Don’t you fucking stop.”

Her directive seemed to give him new energy and he began to pound her as hard as he had ever thus far.  Suddenly his back arched and he tensed up, groaning, as he finished inside of her.  MacCready released her hair and panted as he lay on top of her, catching his breath. He slipped out of her in a wet slick of cum and her own fluids to dangle between her legs.  It felt good to have his warm cock between her legs, even if it were flaccid.  They both took a few breaths before he kissed her again, then pinched her cheek and rolled off of her.

Neither said anything for a time.  Opal’s body began to shiver as the sweat on her skin evaporated and cooled it in the dark, ruined room.  Instinctively she rolled over and nestled herself beside MacCready, who lay with his arm behind his head and was lighting a cigarette with the other. The two watched puffs of cigarette smoke float into the darkness that was the ceiling as they lazily drifted away from the bright orange glow of the embers.

“Good, right?” he said, finally breaking the silence.

 _Classic._ Opal reached over and punched him in the arm.


	2. Chapter 2

 It had been at least a handful of hours.  Opal and MacCready had finally fought their way down to the bottom floor of the Med-Tek complex, and yet, their task was not yet complete.  Opal wanted nothing more than to just high tail it out of that place, but she couldn’t turn her back on MacCready at the last moment – and besides, they were searching for a life saving cure for his son.  This was the only place it could be, in the entire wasteland, and it wouldn’t be right to leave before at least finding out whether or not it was still there. They perched on the upper landing of a set of stairs leading into another foyer, decorated with a reception desk, some ruined filing cabinets, and assorted debris.  The few remaining emergency lights still alive after all that time glowed dully, some of them offering mere flickering instead of any steady output of useful luminescence.  

 _It’s not like you to bail at the last second.  See it through to the end, now._  

The bottom floor was just as dank as any of the upper levels, years of rot and decay taking their toll on the ancient laboratory. Entire sections of the place had fallen in, either from the initial blast of the bombs, or just the natural entropy of the world, causing a very small portion of the site to remain accessible.  The lower they journeyed, the greater amount of the facility that was simply wasted.  Opal really hoped that what they were looking for didn’t get caught in one of those cave-ins.

The tell-tale slither of a feral ghoul nearby further solidified her deep craving to just get out of there.  The place had been full of them.  Opal had idly wondered if many of them were scientists trapped in the building after the blasts, or if they had somehow just been drawn to its isolation and darkness, or perhaps yet, some combination of both. The truth was irrelevant, in the end – they were totally lost to humankind as individuals, and whether they were unethically locked in their labs during a nuclear war, or irradiated victims of it on the outside, the outcome was just as tragic.

 _Would’ve rather been vaporized outright, myself_ , Opal reflected, bitterly. She still struggled with the thought that she should be grateful she was spared the worst of the nuclear holocaust, thanks to the Vault, but she never thought she was signing her life away to become a human experiment for the government, and to then have to emerge into a world of death and depravity…

_You can’t give up, just yet.  You need to find Shaun.  You both deserve answers._

The sound of MacCready’s sniper rifle firing into room shocked her back to the present, quickly followed by a smack.  The dead ghoul’s unsuspecting body fell to the floor with a wet thud.  “Wake up, dummy, have you forgotten we’re on a job, here?” he growled through the side of his mouth, ejecting the spent shell and reloading another.  “You were never gonna survive this world without me, you know that, right?”  With the smoothness of any seasoned rifleman, MacCready readjusted his aim just enough to fire a round into the chest of an advancing ghoul, roused by the first shot, and approaching the bottom of the stairs.  The bullet tore through its irradiated body, causing its chest cavity to simply collapse into itself.  It screamed its protest, before crumpling forward to land onto its face and forming a pool of acrid blood.

“What?  Yes, I – I mean, I’m awake.  Shut up,” Opal hissed in response.  Secretly, she was very appreciative of how seriously MacCready took every situation that wasn’t designated relatively safe, such as walking around within a settlement.  His highly conditioned eyes seemed to identify threats so far away, at times, that Opal sometimes wondered to herself if she’d have even seen them before stumbling upon them.   _I was pretty scraped up and desperate when I hired him, all that time ago.  Maybe he’s right, I probably would never have truly made it without him._

MacCready punched Opal in the arm, shaking her once more from her daydream.  “Seriously, could I get some help, here?!”

Opal glanced down to the landing of the stairs to see two more ghouls had emerged from the hallways beyond, growling in that way that they do, moving at frightening speed.  “Take the left.”  Opal stood, tugging on the bladed knuckle glove on her right hand as a point of habit. She sailed down the first handful of steps, before leaping onto the ruined railing and flinging herself feet-first at the next ghoul at the bottom of the stairs.  She knocked it down easily, but it wouldn’t be so quickly defeated. It swung its left arm at her knees, but she anticipated the swing and kicked the arm out of her way before plunging the blades of her modified brass knuckles into its eyes.  The resultant sound was something like breaking ice when there remained liquid water below the surface, where the blades crunched through thinned bone then weathered flesh and vessels.  The thunder-like crack emitted from MacCready’s rifle above and behind her echoed through the room, followed by a squelch of its own as the slug ripped through the throat of the other ghoul and severed its head from its body.

An eerie quiet settled, as the ghouls twitched slightly in their deaths, and Opal and MacCready both kept silent as they listened for other hostiles.  Opal heard nothing, and glanced up towards MacCready to read him.  He squat completely still, seemingly still listening, but didn’t offer any other reaction.  Finally he locked eyes with Opal, and nodded.  Both stood, and Opal stepped off the body of the ghoul she had extinguished, shaking blood and brains off the blades of her knuckles.

“Is it: door number one, or, door number two?” MacCready took on a comical game show host voice as he gestured between the two hallways that seemed to break off from the foyer.  Opal had stopped wondering how he could sound so much like different things from the popular culture of her original time.  She giggled.

“We can split up, check out both?”

“Hm.  That’s efficient, but possibly not the best idea.  The hallways are separated by a fair distance and when you get in trouble, you will probably be dismembered before I can get to you,” he replied in that smooth, cocky tone of his.

Opal rolled her eyes dramatically at the “when” he used deliberately.  She made a grand gesture towards him.  “Well, it’s your rodeo, cowboy.  What do you want to do?”

MacCready fell quiet for a moment, tapping his right toes idly on the concrete floor.  He walked to the edge of the right hallway, peered down it for a few moments, then did the same to the left.  Opal rocked on the back of her heels while she waited.  He turned to her and gestured she approach, then pointed into the hallway.

“Turrets, both sides.  Seems the ghouls didn’t set them off, somehow.  Maybe not heavy enough after everything,” he muttered.

“Can you take them out?”

“Obviously, though it’s easier to do when it’s not locked on to me as a target.”  MacCready looked her dead in the eyes.

It took Opal a few seconds to register what he was suggesting.  “You want me to bait them?!”

“All you have to do is jump out into the hallway long enough for it to notice you, then jump away, and I’ll blow it up.  No sweat.”

Opal’s heart jumped into her throat. “What?!  Are you insane?  I don’t want to –“

“Talking’s done!” he interrupted, giving Opal a heavy shove into the middle of the hallway.

Opal shrieked.  She stared, frozen, arms and legs splayed out in fear, at the turret hanging on the ceiling halfway down the hall.  It chirped the signature triple beep to indicate it had found a target and immediately began spitting bullets towards her.  She gasped, flailed like a cartoon character, and scrambled to get out of the line of fire.  She was nearly concealed when she slipped and twisted on some gravel – either from a cave-in or the floor being destroyed from previous firings of the turret – completely losing her balance and flapping to the floor.  Instinctively she pulled her exposed right leg from the line of fire, but not before three bullets grazed and gashed her shin, top of her foot, and toes.  The last one sheared off the leather of her boot and dug across several toes.  She cried out in pain, then pulled herself farther away from the opening of the hallway and leaned against the wall.

A pop, then a boom, preceded the “all clear” gong, and then a patina of metal showering to the concrete floor was heard.  Opal spluttered and panted, staring dumbfounded at her bleeding leg and toes, completely caught up in their sting and oozing. MacCready was kneeling next to her, peering at her injuries.

“Come on, you’ve had way worse, you big baby.” Despite his teasing, he pulled a cloth rag from one of his hidden pockets and dabbed at her shin and foot.

Opal’s heart rate had not yet slowed.  She felt her pulse throbbing in her temples. She’d come to expect MacCready’s sarcastic tone about everyone and everything, all the time, but this time, his indifference towards her potential death simply made her mad – especially since –

“You _pushed_ me, you asshole!” she hissed.

MacCready paused from dabbing her wounds to meet her gaze.  “I wasn’t gonna let it gun you down to _death_ , O.  You should know me better than that.”

“You still pushed me!  I was hardly ready!  A-and then…I fell…”  She caught her breath.  “You had no right.”

MacCready exhaled slowly, an odd expression crossing his face, before he turned his attention back to Opal’s foot.  He dabbed it gently once more.  “Okay.  You’re right, and I’m sorry.”

Opal blinked.  “Thank you.”

“I’ll only ever shove you into the path of an oncoming yao guai from now on.”  He stuffed the cloth back into his jacket, stood, and offered his hand.  “The scrapes aren’t deep, looks like your boot took the worst of it.  We’ll have to find you a new pair back in town.  Let’s go, we have to be close, now.”

Opal stared at his offered hand for a moment. Several mixed feelings and thoughts were bubbling up inside and she didn’t know how to process them.  She sighed, then took his hand.  He pulled her up to her feet and led them down the hallway.  They passed several panes of bulletproof glass set into the laboratory wall.  Opal kicked the largest piece of the destroyed turret as she passed it, then immediately regret it, because she kicked it with her injured foot before realizing what she was doing.  She gasped and hopped in pain.

“I’m gonna start writing a book about all the ways you’d have died without me,” MacCready grinned in response to Opal’s carelessness.

“Too bad most of the wasteland can’t _read_ ,” she spat back.

MacCready laughed.  It was a pleasant sound that echoed off the hollow edges of the ruined hallway.  “Now _that_ was a great come back.”  He gestured just ahead of them.  “Look, we made it.  The door to the lab.”

Opal lingered at the window nearest the door to peer inside.  The level of lighting inside the room was no better or worse than that on the outside, but years of neglect had caused a thick layer of dust and other grime and debris to settle against the glass.  She strained her eyes as best she could to survey the potential dangers lurking within. “Okay,” she muttered, “I see one feral on the far side of the room, and one behind the workbench; that one is closest to the door.”  She flexed her hand in her bladed glove.  “I’ll go in and stir them up, and you cover me from behind?”

“So now you’re volunteering to go first?  Geez, O, make up your mind.”

“Shut up.  Is this a go or what?”

“On three.”  MacCready leaned against the left side of the door frame and readied his rifle.  Opal readied her hand on the handle.  “One. Two.  Three!”

Opal pushed on the handle and threw her weight against the door using her shoulder, only for the door to remain firm.  Her head hit the door with a thud and she stumbled to keep her footing.

“It, uh, it appears locked, Opal,” MacCready murmured.

Opal was already rummaging in her pocket for a bobby pin.  “That one’s on us both, for not checking.”  The ferals on the other side could be heard stirring at the noise from the door.  It wouldn’t be until much later that she realized they would rouse for a thump on the door, but didn’t notice when the turret was going off?

“We’ve lost the jump on them.  What now?”

The lock clicked and the door popped open.  “Dash and gash?”

MacCready shrugged.  “I’ll cover you.  Just try not to damage anything that looks…medical.”

Opal pushed the door open, the hinges letting out a dry, metallic groan.  She had braced herself for an immediate confrontation but found herself standing awkwardly while the ferals, who had moved slightly closer to the door, stared back at her.  She shrugged, then pounced towards the feral behind the workbench, closest to the door. She dodged its swipe, countering with her own from her bladed hand.  The sharp steel met the feral’s neck, effectively slicing its head off its body. It fell to the floor in a gushing, sickening heap.  “Gets me every time, how easily that happens.”

“Three o’clock, O!” MacCready barked from the doorway. His aim was focused on the second feral, seemingly in better condition than the first.  It had shimmied its way around the workbench and made a sudden dash towards her.  “I don’t have a clear shot!”

Opal braced herself to engage the advancing hostile. It lunged at her, and she sidestepped before hip checking it into the workbench.

“Not _that_ table!” MacCready bellowed.

Opal swung her leg out and swept the feral off its footing.  “I don’t care for your backseat driving right now, Mac!”  She lifted her heel and stomped it into the feral’s gut.  It squished, and crunched, but didn’t fatally wound the thing.  It screamed, but instead of swinging back as Opal expected it to do, it rolled underneath the table.  “Look out, it’s –“

The sound of the sniper rifle echoed throughout the room, causing Opal’s ears to ring and some of the most fragile glass instruments to shatter.  The entirety of the feral’s skull exploded from the shot, spraying rotted brains and flesh all over Opal’s shins and boots.  Her stomach turned at the sight.  She made her way over to a sink and turned it on, feeling hopeful.  The faucet hissed and popped, but no water appeared.  She sighed, again, then hoisted herself onto the counter and set her feet into the sink.  Thankfully there was a stash of paper towels still in the dispenser.  She worked hard at scraping off as much ancient body parts as she could, particularly around her fresh scratch, while MacCready tenderly picked around the various vials lying around the counters and workbench.

Suddenly, MacCready let out a joyful laugh. “It…it’s here!  It’s actually here!  We found it!!”  He held up a red tube with a syringe on the top.  The word PREVENT was written on the side of it.  Opal smiled but otherwise didn’t reply, rubbing the last large globs of feral ghoul off of her legs.  She sighed a final time, resolved to accept she had done the best she could, but some stains just weren’t going to come out.  She swung her legs out of the sink and caught MacCready gazing at her with that funny look, again.

“What is it?” she asked slowly, confused.

He cleared his throat, and in that instant, the look was gone.  “There’s some on your nose.”

“Ahh!”  Opal immediately reached up to wipe off her face, before she realized he was teasing her.

MacCready turned to leave, laughing.  “Let’s go, dummy.  We have earned ourselves a drink!  I’ll buy you one, with your caps, of course.”

Opal rolled her eyes and followed him out.

The sun had fully set when the two emerged back under the open sky.  Opal took a deep breath of the cool air.  The familiar Commonwealth tang swept through her throat and lungs, but somehow it was that much better than the stale air of the many floors of Med-Tek.  She flipped up her Pip Boy.  As if on cue, she yawned when she saw the time.  “1:30 in the morning.  What do you want to do?”

MacCready interlaced his fingers together and cracked all his knuckles, simultaneously.  “I could do with a nap.  Let’s lock ourselves inside for a few hours and crack off in the morning.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mm.  We have the cure in hand, now.  A few more hours’ delay won’t make a huge difference.  I don’t like to travel after sundown.”

They re-entered the building and blocked the doors with one of the ruined couches in the main entrance foyer, then piled as many cushions and other soft things they could find onto the floor.  Opal stretched herself out, wiggled around to feel as comfortable as possible, then closed her eyes.  She sighed as she let her muscles relax, letting herself switch off for the time being.  MacCready tenderly set down his affairs, including the newly acquired Prevent, then curled up next to her, wrapping his arms around her waist and nestling his chin onto her shoulder.  They were both asleep within minutes.

MacCready shook her awake.  Opal mumbled something incoherent and checked her Pip Boy for the time: 5:54 AM.  She rubbed her eyes and sighed.  “Really?”

“Yeah, let’s get going, now.  The room at the Rexford will be on me when we get there, okay?” MacCready’s voice was…odd.  It sounded tender, and genuine.

 _He’s anxious to get the medicine on the road to his son.  That’s reasonable._  She sat up and stretched.  “I’m gonna hold you to it.  Let’s head out.”

The pair picked their way south back towards Goodneighbor.  MacCready practically dragged her with him, assuming a pace Opal had never seen before. They pushed their way through the gates of Goodneighbor just after noon.  A couple of drifters glanced their way, but generally, there was nothing remarkable about the entrance to the town.

“I’ll go talk to Daisy, just hang tight.” MacCready walked off to the main trading post of the town.  Opal nodded and perched herself on the low standing wall that stretched from the artificial boundary wall of the town. She stretched her heels out in front of her and exhaled, feeling like she could let her guard down to thirty percent instead of the usual ninety or higher. There were a lot of rumours about Goodneighbor, and some of them were true, but for the most part the town operated with the “honour among thieves” adage, and no one wanted to screw with Hancock for anything. No one would dare try to rob her in broad daylight, and certainly not while she was travelling with MacCready. The man had clout in that place.

Opal tapped her toes together as she stared up at the sky, gazing at the whispy clouds lazily drifting by.  Her thoughts gravitated towards MacCready, and his weird looks as of late.  She had grown to genuinely like him, a lot, and he seemed to like her, too.  Their relationship had maintained the casual, physical nature established in that ruined law office so soon after they had started travelling together.

She glanced over at him and caught a glimpse of his back in the broken window of Daisy’s Discounts.   _You do want something more, from him, don’t you? You should just tell him.  If he breaks it all off, then he wasn’t worth your time._

Opal exhaled and looked back up at the sky. Thinking that hard about her relationship with MacCready felt way too complicated for her mind to process, especially after only a few hours’ sleep that morning.  She yawned and stretched, suddenly feeling very sleepy.

A pair of military-issue, black leather boots dropped next to her on the wall.  She startled and looked to see MacCready standing there, finishing a cigarette. “One pair of non-turret-styled boots, for the lady, as promised.”

“Oh,” Opal replied, softly.  She had nearly forgotten his pledge to replace the boots. Being tossed in front of a turret seemed like it happened years ago.  She picked them up gingerly and promptly put them on.  “You remembered.”

“I managed to negotiate Daisy down to thirty caps for the set.  She originally was trying to be firm on seventy, so I saved you forty caps.”

“…you used my money?!”

“Well, yeah.  They’re _your_ boots.”  He flicked the butt of his cigarette to the ground with a smirk.

Opal had no words.

“Come on, let’s grab a couple brews from the Third Rail and then put our feet up over at the Hotel.”  MacCready offered his hand to help her stand.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just go hit the hay.”  She accepted his hand once more and walked down the alley between the shops and the state house.

“All right.  We’ll grab those drinks later, then.”

By the time they had settled up with Clair at the check in counter, Opal felt like her body weighed a thousand pounds and she was struggling to pull her ass up the two flights of stairs to the rented rooms.  She dropped her utility belt, shed her boots and peeled her bodysuit off her chest to her waist, then proceeded to wash up in the dented basin.

MacCready carefully draped his duster over a chair in the corner, placed his hat on top, and unhooked his ammo belts.  Opal sighed contentedly, enjoying a twisted pleasure at watching the dirt, grime, and unmentionable else drip off her face and into the bowl, even if the water was room temperature at best.  She pat her skin dry with the nearly threadbare towel and looked over to MacCready.  “Do you want to wash up?  I’ll change the water for you.”

He had that weird look on his face, again.  “No,” he replied.  MacCready was standing against the wall, his arms crossed casually against his chest.

Opal shrugged.  “Suit yourself.”  That confusing mix of thoughts and emotions resurfaced in her mind, and she resented their appearance, wanting to simply crash onto the bed and sleep.   _Maybe he was going to break it all off, once our task was complete, after all.  Maybe he just feels like he can’t come out and say it._  The cuts on her shin and toes were stinging.  She perched herself on the edge of the bed and inspected her wounded foot briefly for signs of infection.  Her toes seemed to have scabbed up cleanly and perfectly. MacCready hadn’t budged from his lean on the wall.  Opal swallowed.  “Do you want to break up?” she blurted, unable to continue to contain herself.

MacCready’s eyes widened.  “What?!”

“You’ve been looking at me weird like that since yesterday.  We finished the job, and your son will be saved.  Do you want to, you know, break up, now?  Were you worried about telling me?”  

“O, that’s –“

“You can just be honest, Mac.  Isn’t this the wasteland?  There’s no time for, ah, dishonesty.  Leading someone on.  That kind of stuff.”

“Oh, my god, Opal.  No.”  He took the three steps required to sit next to her on the bed.  “No, I…I’m sorry I made you feel that way.  I _have_ been feeling kind of weird, but the truth is…”  MacCready took a breath and shook his head.  “Listen:  I loved Lucy. We grew up together.  She had a talent for patching people up regardless of how badly they were hurt, always kept a level head.  She was an amazing mom.”  He cleared his throat, then continued.  “We were a great team, in a lot of ways.  We took care of each other, as best we could.”  

He had paused.  Opal wasn’t sure where he was going with all of it.  “Okay,” she replied.

“Ah.”  MacCready sighed, seemingly struggling with the word flow.  “Lucy and I were solid, but not like us – you, and I.”  He reached over and squeezed her knee.  “You have your eyes open.  You’ve actually got my back.  You…you risked yourself for me, and my family.”  He paused.  “I think we accidentally found ourselves a good thing, here.”  Finally, he took a breath.  “Well?  You’re in this, too, right?”

“WOULD YOU SHUT UP AND JUST FUCK, ALREADY?!” bellowed an unknown male voice from under the floor.

“JEALOUS!” Opal screeched back.

“Ignore that a--, that idiot.  Answer me.”  MacCready took her chin in his hand and turned her face towards him.

Opal felt herself fall deeply into his eyes.  They were kind of small, and beady, but at that moment they gazed at her so intensely, she thought she could get lost in them, forever.  So many things were clashing in her mind.  Her instinct was to just fling her arms around him, and gush “yes, yes, yes!” over and over, fully and freely accepting his proposal.  When she had asked if he was just going to dump her, she hadn’t expected this, at all – at most, a “don’t be stupid” and “let’s just go to bed.”  She hadn’t imagined the suggestion they could become, or perhaps already were, more than a casual relationship.

Isn’t that what she wanted?  Didn’t she just finish giving herself this pep talk while he settled up at Daisy’s, not twenty minutes prior?  Finally faced with the serious possibility, she didn’t think she, well, _didn’t_ want that, but what was his idea of a commitment? Was she even ready for this, so soon? What would Nate have thought of her seeing a man who wilfully shoved her in front of a live turret?

_Nate doesn’t get to think anything at all.  He’s dead._

“Oh my god, I can see the smoke coming out of your ears,” he groaned, interrupting her thoughts.  MacCready made to stand.  Opal caught his hand and stood, herself, lacing her hands in his dirty hair and kissed him deeply, before giving any of it any further thought.  “Mm…wow,” he mumbled after they had broken their kiss, holding their foreheads close and stroking her hair.  The two stood for a quiet moment, enjoying their closeness. “What’s next?”

“That hard-earned nap?”

“I meant for you, duh.  We saved my son, now we save yours.”

“Oh, right.”  She pondered for a moment.  “Last lead I got was to look up a PI named Valentine.  Do you know Diamond City?”

“Diamond City…”  MacCready’s voice and expression took on a dreamy tone.

“I guess that’s a ‘yes.’”

“I haven’t been in years, but I’m sure I can get us there pretty easily.”  He kissed her on the forehead and released her, then walked towards the door.  “I’m going out for a smoke, I’ll bring back a couple drinks.  Toss me your caps purse?”

He narrowly dodged her boot, flying full speed towards his head.


	3. Chapter 3

They stood there, side by side, staring into the almost unbelievably neon green haze that marked none other than the Glowing Sea.  The air itself seemed to shimmer with the sheer toxicity that was the unholy amount of radiation present in the area.  Everything felt extra dry, and the smell was simply indescribable.  Metallic, stagnant – like the smell of a penny that had sat in a puddle for a long time, and was also irradiated.  Opal couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that despite two full centuries, the place remained like a nuclear ground zero unlike anywhere else she had been so far, since having left the Vault.  She heard the rustle of the leather strap brush against fabric as MacCready shifted his grip on his sniper rifle and glanced over to see he was nearly twitching at all the perceived threats.  His eyes darted around, taking in the surroundings with his keen sight, cataloguing everything.

Opal exhaled slowly before speaking.  “Well,” was all she managed.

“It’s _packed_ with hostiles.  All the grossest ones, too.  Ferals, scorpions.  Further in, who knows.”  MacCready sighed and rest the butt of his rifle on the ground next to his feet. The gun made a hollow thud as it made contact with the ruined pavement of the ancient roadway.  “Worst part is, I bet there’s some amazing treasure somewhere in there, and all the brainless twerps skulking around the place would never appreciate it, in another two hundred years.”

“There _is_ ,” Opal replied, “it’s in the form of the only scientist to ever break out of the Institute, so he must have the key to getting my son back.”

MacCready idly toed some dirt before kicking a pebble towards the green haze.  “I get it, the part about getting your kid back.  If someone had taken my kid, no matter how large or dangerous or, well, mysterious, I would probably charge straight into a sea of glowing green radiation if there were a chance that I could get him back.”  He shook his head.  “Kellogg knew something was up.  He suspected the Institute was trying to get rid of him, in one way or another.  Either they hoped you would react in the most typical fashion and exact murderous revenge, or, they wanted _him_ to traverse the Wasteland to End All Wastelands and either be killed in there by radiation poisoning, or a beast, or both.”  He looked over at Opal, who was staring into the haze, brooding.  “The guy thought he’d survive you, or that you were the least awful of the two options, O.”

Opal rocked on her heels, then grinned.  “Flattery will get you everywhere, hot shot.”

“Smartass.”

“Mm, keep it comin’.”

MacCready wet his lips but did not reply.  Usually they would quip at each other almost endlessly, in a kind of twisted foreplay that often ended with both of them ripping the clothing off each other’s backs.  His quietness in that moment indicated to Opal that he truly was worried for her.

She sighed and softened her tone and her stance. “How do I help ease your mind, hm? What can I say?  What could I do?”

MacCready sighed, his nostrils flaring, but again offered no response.  The two stood silently for a few moments more.  Sweat trickled down Opal’s forehead to bead at the tip of her nose before dropping to the ground, below.  Her entire body felt drenched from having stomped in the steel power armour suit for the past several hours and she couldn’t help but wonder how her late husband had ever made it look so easy, all that time ago.  A lifetime ago.

“I don’t like this.  Let’s go back and find another suit, and I’ll come with you.”

“It took us that long to find _this_ heap of junk.  Who knows how long it would take to find a second one?  One that _isn’t_ locked behind high tech pre-war security, that is.”  Opal growled at the several memories of stumbling upon full suits of power armor, to find them locked behind computer security that neither of them could crack.

“These past few weeks,” he interrupted in a quiet, but very serious tone, “these most _recent_ weeks, have been some of the best in my entire life.  I had no opinion of you when we first met –“

“Bullshit.”

“—fine, I had a _bit_ of a low opinion of you when we first met, true.  Your hair was still really clean, flowy, soft, shiny; your skin was so smooth, it glowed, and I thought I could almost get away with charging you 250 caps a _day_ for what it seemed like I would have to do just to keep you alive.  I didn’t, though, because I really needed the job and if you were that pristine, there was no way you could afford it.”

Opal shyly fiddled with a strap on her bladed brass knuckles, hoping he wouldn’t notice her awkward blushing.  Her eyes flicked back to his face and she saw he was staring straight into the sky, not looking at her at all.

MacCready opened and closed his mouth a few times, as though he were unsure what to say next.  Finally, he let out a frustrated grunt, took a sudden step towards Opal, gripped her arm and looked her in the eyes.  “We can talk about it later, okay?  I can’t figure how to explain why, right now, but all that I need you to know, is –“  He paused, and swallowed.  Opal blinked, coming down from the surprise of his sudden animation.  He took a breath, then spoke again.  “I have…feelings for you.  Strong ones.  Attachment-type ones.  And it wasn’t until we stood here, staring into that bright green death, that I realized it’d be really shi -- terrible for me if you died in there and left me behind. To possibly be left behind like that, again.”

Opal felt like she was melting, on the inside and outside.  Her entire body felt warm, soft, and fluid…and, happy.  Instinctively, she wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him, tight. She felt him startle, then return the hug, just as tightly.  “I watched my husband be shot and killed before my very eyes, Mac.  I was left behind, too, and I would never, ever, do something like that to you, or to anyone I cared about.”  Tears formed in her eyes, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand.  She broke their embrace and looked him in the eyes once more.  “I mean, yeah, I have some feelings for you, too.  Okay?  Happy? You have made me a gushing sap.”

“It’s totally gross.”

“Asshole.  You started it!”

“I regret nothing.”

Opal sniffed and wiped tears from her eyes once more.  “What happens, now?” she asked softly.

MacCready kicked another rock towards the green haze, then tilted his head from side to side causing his neck to pop.  “Honestly?  I want to tell you to skip it.  Don’t go in there.  I want to tell you we’ll find another way into the Institute that doesn’t involve radioactive death.  And if…if we don’t…”

_He’s going to say it.  That’s the kind of guy he is._

“If we don’t, we just, you know.”  He shrugged.

“’You know,’ what?” she pressed.

He looked over and gave her a lecherous wink.  “We just start another one.”

Opal’s heart and stomach sank.  She took a deep breath, searched for his best intentions, and landed on the fact that he didn’t want her to leave him, and die.  He’d been a widower before, and was feeling vulnerable.  He’d grown up in this terrible world where you couldn’t worry too much about the past, only how to claw your way forwards.  The loss of a child, while infinitely sad, was simply something that happened a lot, and you mourned and moved forward, or you died, too.  She’d adjusted to the new world in a lot of ways in the past months, in part due to MacCready’s patience, and in part due to a raw drive to carry on, but some of the old world thinking still prevailed.

She stepped towards him and took his hand.  “I’m going to go in there, get what I need, and come back to you.  I promise. We find a way to my son, and otherwise, we…”  It was Opal’s turn to offer a suggestive shrug.

MacCready gave her a sideways glance with a slight smile. “All right, then.  Nice to know where we stand.”

“This is my ‘everything,’ to find my son, find some answers.  If we’re this close, I can’t leave it, now.”

“I told you, I get it.  I just hope this isn’t a trap set up to grab you, too.”

She paused from the conversation, and unzipped a small, concealed pocket of her leather jumpsuit.  Opal carefully reached in and pulled out her late husband’s gold wedding band.  She squinted at it in the sunshine, as though looking at it for the first time.  It was slightly scuffed, but the sunlight still glinted brightly off the polished, precious metal.  Her heart fluttered at the triggered memory of fitting the ring on Nathan’s hand.   _He had such a dopey grin on his face, as if he could barely believe it was happening._ She smiled at the thought.  She closed her hand over the ring, closed her eyes, and took a breath.

“What’s going on, O?”

Opal opened her eyes and looked directly into MacCready’s. “This was my husband’s wedding ring. I want you to hold it for me.”

“…what…?”

“I’m asking you to hang on to it, for now.  Like a task.  You hold on to this, I go in there,” she nodded towards the Sea, “then come pick it up from you when I get back.  ‘Anytime you want me to carry some of that valuable gear you’re holding’…”

MacCready plucked the ring from her outstretched hand and inspected it very closely.  He turned it over in his fingers, watching the sunlight jump off it in glimmers and sprays.  “What’s it worth?”

“It cost me over a thousand dollars in 2073, but there’s no market for gold jewellery now, so probably…nothing, other than the sentimental value.”

“Oh,” he scoffed, when his eyes widened, then softened once more.  “…oh,” he repeated, gentler.

Opal let him stew for a moment.  “Well?  You taking the job?”

“I have one condition.”

“Okay.”

“You get three days, max.  Regardless of your success, you are back here by midnight at the end of the third day.  Your supplies won’t hold out for more than that, anyways.”

“Sure, that’s reasonable.”

He flicked the ring into the air and caught it with a dramatic flair.  “You don’t get out of the suit for any reason, you got that?”

“I won’t –“

“Keep your damn eyes open, too, I won’t be able to save your ass a dozen times.”

“ _Mac!”_

“You should probably leave your caps, too, I doubt there are many traders out th –“

Opal threw her arms around him one more time and hugged him close.  She inhaled his familiar scent of sunbathed skin, sweat, gun oil, and worn leather. She took comfort in the warmth of his body, and the sensation of their bodies pressed close together.   _I’ll come back to you.  You’re right to suggest my son could already be long gone, and you’re here, now.  I need to at least try.  I owe that to Nate, and I owe that to Shaun._

MacCready pulled away and kissed her on the forehead in gentle benediction.  “Remember – three days.”

“I’ll be back in two.”

“That’s cocky.”

Opal punched the alarm date and her current coordinates into her Pip Boy for safe keeping as she walked back towards the power armour.  She took a deep breath as the mechanical suit hissed and clicked back into place around her body.

_I’ll be fine.  Everything will be fine and I will be fine._

The hazy green radiation made for decent cover, surprisingly enough.  Opal crept along the natural structures and stayed in the shadows whenever possible. Most of the hostiles seemed to gather in groups, and out in the open, mucking through glowing, greasy puddles. Perhaps the heaviest radiation did the strangest things to whatever lived in there.  Opal didn’t care to contemplate it, ultimately, not really caring why she was able to walk by packs of ghouls the way she did, wearing a suit that was the opposite of stealthy.

Kellogg had left some coordinates in his recon file, but no indication of what they meant.  Opal diligently followed the blinking dot on her Pip Boy map, stopping for brief physical rests but choosing to ration her food and water for as long as possible.  It was not easy to tell the passing of time through the Glowing Sea.  Eventually she noticed the sky was simply less bright green than it had been, but that hardly indicated how much time really passed. She decided to pay more attention to the clock on her Pip Boy and not just the map.

_The damn helmet skews my view, too, since it’s tinted.  Nate, how did you tolerate this the way that you did?_

Another couple of hours passed.  The watch indicated it was past nine o’clock, and therefore, well past sundown. Her thoughts immediately turned to MacCready and how he was certain to be indoors somewhere by then.   _Maybe I know him, after all._  She thought of him, borrowing a ruined house, his legs propped up while he sat in an arm chair, gazing out the window into the moonlit surroundings, his rifle next to him, puffing a cigarette…

Opal tripped on a large boulder, remnant of some destroyed raised highway, and clattered to the ground.  The sound of her armour hitting the other rocks echoed loudly in her helmet.  She flailed clumsily and panicked as she realized she was rolling down a steep incline.  Opal finally came to a stop in loose dirt and gravel at the bottom of the hill, feeling so tossed, there was no way she could avoid puking.  She quickly popped her helmet off and retched. Various gauges, including the Geiger counter, were beeping, buzzing, and clicking in ways that sounded bad.

_Fucking hell.  I hope I haven’t lost the suit.  I’ll never make it out of here, without it._  She spat as much vile fluid as she could out of her mouth and popped the helmet back on, hoping even that short amount of intense radiation exposure wouldn’t cause her issue later.

_“Now, you’re a ghoul!” MacCready would say, and my answer would have to be, “but I didn’t want to puke inside the helmet,_ that _would have been gross!”_

_Thinking about MacCready got you into this mess!  Move it, dumbass, or you’re going to lose more than your face._

Opal groaned to herself and forced her body to stand back up on its own feet.  Some of the beeping ceased once the suit was standing upright, again.  There was a warning flash in the bottom left cover of her vision, seeming to indicate her right leg was damaged.  She tested the movement and something was off about being able to walk smoothly, but otherwise, the suit didn’t seem to be totalled. She sighed in her relief and pulled the map up once more.  Her mood became instantly elevated to discover she was within one hundred meters of the target coordinates – sixty-three, to be exact.  She was almost there!  She should be able to see it from where she stood…

Opal gazed out into the land in front of her, and thought she saw a settlement. She frowned, in complete disbelief that anyone would build houses out in this wasteland.  Regardless, she could tell that the coordinates referred her to that place.  She moved forward.

As she drew closer, she saw not only artificial lighting in the form of candles and lanterns, but _people._ They were clothed in robes and sandals, seemingly indifferent to the amount of radiation exposure they endured as a result.  None of them took notice to her clanking through their ranks in her oversized metal suit, apparently in the throes of their own, unknown, world.

“Hold it, wanderer,” barked a figure standing on a wooden boardwalk between shacks.  She held a lantern emitting that all-too-familiar green glow and held up her other hand in the gesture of stop.  “We are peaceful, but that will not give you the right to storm into our place of worship and habitation.  Who are you, and what do you want?”

Opal blinked several times, hardly believing her eyes.  She wanted to take this person by the shoulders, shake them hard, and scream WHAT ARE YOU DOING, HERE?!  DON’T YOU KNOW THIS PLACE WILL KILL YOU?   She cleared her throat and chose tact, instead.  “I’m Opal.  I am just a wanderer, as you said.  I came here looking for a man called Virgil.  The coordinates to this…place was the last lead that I had.”

“Ah, yes.  Him. Hmm, I have forgotten my manners. Welcome, Opal.  I am Mother Isolde and we are the Children of Atom.”

“The Children of Atom?”

“Yes, dear.  We believe in the holy, healing radiation of Atom to be a gift he has given to us while we must exist as we wait for Division.”

_I have no idea what any of that means, and I don’t care._  “Do you know Virgil? Is he here, somewhere?”

“Virgil came _through_ here, yes, but we asked him to leave.”

Opal’s patience was beginning to run thin.  “Where did he go?”

“He has settled into a cave southwest of here.  Be warned, wanderer Opal, he is not who he seems.  He is dangerous.”

“The whole world is dangerous.  Can I borrow that?”  Opal yanked the lantern from Isolde’s grip before walking off.

“Goodbye, Opal, and good luck!” Isolde called behind her.

Opal muttered to herself, using her compass to re-orient herself to the southwest and clomped off.  She hoped Virgil had built some kind of radiation refuge she could borrow, even for a few hours.  The idea of being so close to the end of her goal had made various parts of her body begin to suggest they were tired, hungry, thirsty, and so on.  She wanted to take a break.

The lantern she took from Isolde provided enough glow for her feet as she walked through more of the same landscape as the past several hours. Opal realized it would make her more of a target when surrounded by so much ambient darkness, but it forced her to stay focussed, too.  She couldn’t afford another fall.  She squinted, hardly able to believe her eyes – there was a large formation of darkness blocking out the stars and sky, above…and a small glow from inside.

Opal all but collapsed through the entryway of the cave, catching her breath. The final sprint she made to get there was a choice she completely regret.  Her breathing slowed after a few moments, and that’s when she realized her Geiger counter was quiet.  Sure enough, it registered no radiation within the cave.  Her sweaty, shaking fingers barely operated the release to the suit, and she practically slid out of it once it popped open.  The air in the cave was cool, and stagnant, but tasted like the freshest thing she’d breathed in hours.  Her entire body began to shiver, her clothing completely drenched and plastered to her skin.  She instinctually began to unzip her custom leather jumpsuit, peeled it off her body, then immediately did the same with the tank top and shorts she wore underneath.

Opal was in the process of wringing out her shorts to hang them next to the tank top and the jumpsuit, both draped on the armour to dry, when a deep male voice called to her from further within the cave.  “Hello?  Is…is someone there?”

She froze, horrified that she had just stripped herself nearly nude and was instead sweat-soaked and standing there in her skivvies.  

“I’m armed, and I have a turret, and a guard robot, so be warned – ah, oh. Hello.”  Virgil had finally stepped into the end of the cavern hall and seemed to get a good look at her, standing completely unarmed and unclothed.

Opal blushed, then offered a shy wave.  Virgil was standing in front of a floodlight and it was impossible to see any features other than a large shadow.  She squinted but it didn’t help.  “You’re Virgil?”

“I am.  Who are you?”

“I’m Opal…and really, really sweaty. Can I borrow a shirt, or something?”

“Hang on.”  Virgil stepped away, then returned and tossed a lab coat her way.  “That’s the best I’ve got.”

“Thanks.”  Opal slipped the lab coat on and finally padded her way down the hallway and towards the light.  Virgil stepped back, causing Opal to gasp reflexively.  “I…oh.  I thought –“

“I know what you thought.  You’re obviously not from the Institute,” he grumbled.

“How do you know that?”

“I just do.  What I don’t know is why you’d come all the way out here to find me, and you better start talking before I do sic my guns on you.”  Virgil led her into the greater part of the cavern, a single room, fashioned with various scientific looking electronics and equipment, as well as the necessities of life.

Opal flopped herself onto the nearest chair, all of her muscles and bones aching from the exertion that was walking around in a power armour suit all day. She attempted to comb her fingers through her hair and was met with a tangled mess that was equally greasy and sweaty.  She shuddered to imagine its appearance and chose to ignore that thought, for now.  

A bottle of water appeared in front of her face.  Opal startled, then accepted.  “Ah, thank you.”

“It’s nothing.  I have a tap and a purification device.”  Virgil leaned his hulking self against his desk and crossed his mutated arms.  “Now, seriously, what do you want?”

Opal downed the entire bottle of water in a single go.  “Well, I want to get into the Institute.”

Virgil nearly fell off the desk.  “I should have known you were insane,” he murmured.

“So, you _can_ get me in?”

Virgil reached up and rubbed between his eyes.  “To think they’re so worried about the people up here, when they really have no clue, still.”

“Sorry?”

“Ugh.”  Virgil began to gesture with his hands, as though to emphasize his points.  “It’s completely _possible_ to get in, but it’s not exactly straight forward.  We don’t have some kind of secret pathway, not in the way you’d understand it, anyways.”

Opal tossed the empty bottle across the room and accidentally hit the robot. It popped off the Protectron’s faceplate and clattered to the floor.  Virgil groaned.  “Just tell me what to do, or where to go, and I’ll be on my way.  I won’t even tell them you sent me.”

“That second part is most definitely true, and besides, if they don’t murder you the moment you set a single atom onto the Institute, that will surprise even me.”  Virgil leaned back for a few quiet moments.  Opal fidgeted with the lab coat while she waited.  He sighed.  “I’ll try to make it easier for you to understand.  There’s no door to the Institute, but they make their own doors. They use technology, physics, radio waves, to appear on the surface and back, as needed.”

“Teleportation?”  Opal could hardly believe her ears.

“Right.  What you’ll need is the proprietary technology, and the code, to crack into the feed and simply use the pathway they’ve already set up.”  He continued to gesture grandly.  “You’d have to find a courser, kill it, and take its chip.”

Opal blinked.  “A what?”

Virgil groaned yet again.  “A courser. The Institute’s finest synth. Fast, strong, ruthless, and nothing but trained to follow strict orders.  They’re heavily armed and know how to use them, too.”

“So where do I find one?”

“Are you –“ Virgil spluttered, then shook his head.  “The CIT ruins.  I would start there.  The most common in-out point is directly above where the Institute lies, literally.”

Opal clapped her hands together.  “Great!”

“That’s not the end of it, though.  The courser chip is like…it’s like the radio.  It receives the signal, but it won’t be able to teleport you there. You’ll need something to scramble your molecules and trick the system to send you through.”

“…a door.”

“God – yes, _fine_ , a door.  And that you’ll have to build yourself.”

Opal narrowed her eyes.  “What do you want?”

Virgil startled, then smiled – at least, the best he could, in his condition. “I was working on a project, a serum to reverse, well, this.  It’s in my lab, in BioScience.  I’ll draw up the schematics of a teleporter, and in exchange, you bring me that serum from my lab.”

Opal considered for a moment.  “How long do you need?”

“A day or two? I was in BioScience, so this isn’t exactly my expertise –“

“Fine, fine.  Mind if I just crash here, for a while?”  She slinked her way over to his recovered mattress, lying on the floor, as stained and decrepit as anything she had become used to in the wasteland by then. “Just gonna…there, we go.”  Opal clicked off the lantern in the corner next to the mattress and closed her eyes, her body quickly succumbing to sleep.

“Insane,” she thought she heard Virgil growl once more from across the cavern.

Opal was shaken, hard, by the shoulder.  She jolted awake and immediately swatted the hand away, to see Virgil’s mutated and swollen mug looming over her.  “What?” she yawned.

“It’s been ten hours and seventeen minutes.  You need to leave, now.  Here,” he shoved a piece of paper in her hand with a code scrawled on it, barely legible.  “My penmanship has…declined, but that’s the title of the serum I need you to bring me. Understood?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she yawned again.  Opal felt as though she could easily sleep for an additional ten hours. Another bottle of water appeared in her face.  She gladly accepted.

“I restored your power armour, too.”

“You what?  I mean, thank you.”

“Yeah, well, you took my bed, so I ended up with some time to kill.  Older technology is so much easier to manipulate than the current stuff.”  Virgil had perched himself once more against a nearby shelf.  Opal realized it was because the man-mutant was no longer able to fit into a chair.  “Besides, if you die getting out of here, I’ll never get that serum.”

Opal nodded.   _For a former Institute crony, he sure knows how to fit in to the wasteland._  She finished her water and this time, held the empty bottle towards Virgil.  “I’ll see myself out.”

“That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day.”


	4. Chapter 4

Opal clomped onto that piece of broken road indicated by the coordinates she had logged into her Pip Boy, where she had left MacCready, and practically jumped out of the power armour, as sweaty as her exit from the suit the night before.  It was then missing the left leg piece, dented in the chest, and the right arm piece had been almost entirely sheared off by an alpha deathclaw.  The trek back was infinitely more difficult than the journey through, as if she had stirred up the hostiles on her way in and they had been looking for her.  Ultimately, the suit kept her unscathed and safe from the radiation.  She was grateful for it, but equally grateful to finally shed the damn thing.  The day was clear as any and she stood on the center line of the ruined thoroughfare, squinting into the sparse brush and rocks just beyond for a sign of MacCready.

A slight breeze rustled the dead and dried foliage and refreshed her sweaty, exposed skin.  She frowned as she looked all around, but saw no one.   _Maybe my coordinates were a bit off?_  She turned north and started taking slow steps down the road, looking back and forth for any sign of MacCready and saw none.  Just as she were about to consider it was he who’d abandoned her in the end, a soft scuff of a boot and a very familiar scent behind her broke her concentration. Opal gasped in her startle as he swung an arm around her waist, hauled her almost violently off the road and tossed her into a sniper’s nest he’d built out of a rusted car and dead brush in the ditch.  The operational space was hardly wide enough for a single body.  MacCready had to position himself over top of her, while she laid on her back, but it was not at all in the manner of a proposition.

The surprise of his pounce and being stuffed into the small space delayed her ability to compose something cheeky.  He stared out into the wasteland, eyes darting to and fro.  “How the _hell_ do you ever survive out there, you idiot?  I can hardly believe it,” he hissed.

“Lucky?”  She took a breath to say something else when MacCready finally looked down, his left index finger on his lips, and making the throat-slitting gesture with the right. She snapped her mouth shut dramatically and said no more.  Finally, she heard it, the unmistakably heavy, rhythmic thumping of an approaching deathclaw.  Opal’s gaze reached up to MacCready’s face and she watched a trickle of sweat slide from his left temple, to his jaw, then into his goatee.  The angle kept her from seeing anything out the broken windshield other than the sky above, and MacCready’s body pinned her such that she couldn’t move past her waist, either.  

The ground trembled slightly as the power armour suit crashed to the pavement, allegedly knocked over by the deathclaw.  It sounded like several tin cans hitting the same point of the ground all at once.  Opal barely dared to breathe.  The deathclaw could be heard sniffing around, the air veritably rattling through its nostrils.   _What a disgusting sound._  After several minutes, that felt more like hours, the deathclaw retreated back into the Glowing Sea.  

“Never been so thankful for a pack of feral ghouls,” MacCready muttered.

“Huh?”

“Of _course_ you didn’t see them, either, what was I thinking?  And that deathclaw had been tailing you for an hour!  I almost compromised this position entirely by flashing this at you.” He held up the wedding ring and turned it back and forth in the sun.  “How did you miss it?!”

Opal frowned, then shrugged.  “I didn’t see it.”

“Obviously.”

“Can we get out, now?  Or is there some pack of super mutants within a day’s walk from here that we should avoid?”

“Shut up.”  MacCready twisted, stretched his legs out behind him and crawled backwards from the sniper’s nest.  Opal propped herself up onto her hands and turned to do the same, when MacCready’s hand poked back into the sniper’s nest.  She smirked and took it.  He pulled her out and directly into a very tight embrace, cradling her head in one of his arms, against his shoulder.

“Thank you,” Opal murmured into his coat.

“You’d be dead without me.”

_There he is._  “You should be saying that to the deathclaw.”  She broke their embrace and lowered herself into the ditch, letting out a contented sigh of relief to be off her feet once more. She relished the smell and feel of the firm earth underneath and behind her.  It felt like lying on a bed of feathers after being confined to the armour for nearly two days.

“Aren’t we confident?”  He sat next to her on the ground, gazing up to the sky. “You think you could just kick it in the knees until it keeled over?”

“I’d kick it in the _shins_. I learned a few things growing up with older brothers.”

“Kick it in the shins!  Well, pardon me!  People of the wasteland, many of you have died in vain for trying to _shoot_ the damn deathclaws in the face when you should have been kicking it in the shins.  The wise and knowledgeable Opal Of Vault 111 has spoken.”  

“Are you done, now?  Got your tantrum all out and finished?”  She closed her eyes, certainly not feeling any patience for his current mood. Her body ached, was bruised in the weird places that the power armour rubbed on her skin, and she didn’t want to deal with some guilt trip from him over how he would have escaped the highly irradiated crater differently.

MacCready was quiet for a few moments.  Opal merely sat and listened to the breeze rustling through the dead tree branches overhead, and the distant scuffle of wasteland beasts behind them in the Glowing Sea.  Eventually, MacCready reached over and took her hand, then pulled it back with the wedding ring in his hand.

“What’s this?”

“I gotcha,” Opal giggled, keeping her eyes closed, preferring to imagine the look on his face.

“How did you – it must have just fallen out of my pocket,” MacCready spluttered, plunking the ring back into her hand.

“Nope!”  Opal sat up and unzipped her jumpsuit to put the ring back in its rightful place.  She sighed an additional exhale of extreme relief as the cooler air reached the sweat-drenched parts of her body within the leather.

“I’ll get you for that one.”

“I hope you try!”  She stripped the leather off her body but elected to remain in her t-shirt and shorts while out in the middle of the wilderness.  The thin clothing stuck fast on her skin, but the air and breeze made her feel worlds more comfortable.

MacCready’s expression flickered mischievously.  “Oh, is that so?”  He leaned towards her, straddling her chest with his own, and slowly lowered himself to kiss her, when he paused, coughed, and pulled himself completely off of her.

“What?  What’s wrong?”

“You smell _so_ bad right now, O.  Oh _man_.”

“What?!  Shut up, I know I’m sweaty, but come on –“

“Noooooo no,” he drew the words out and held his hands up in surrender. “You smell _terrible._  You smell like the worst body odour, and metal, oil, plastic, _and_ like you spent the night in a rotting garbage dump that had never been aired out.”  MacCready coughed again, for emphasis.

Opal’s face burned.  “I’d like to know what you think I _should_ smell like after spending two days in an air-tight power armour suit and running for my life?!”  

MacCready ignored her, picking through their things and tossing her a pair of jeans and a fresh t-shirt.  She leaned over to coyly sniff her armpit and recoiled so violently she smacked the back of her head on the ditch bank.

“See?  I told you.”

Opal grumbled, stripped the drenched t-shirt and shorts, and slipped on the dry, clean clothing.  While she did so, MacCready gathered up any remaining affairs and prepared to head out. “Better?”

“As good as it gets until we can sterilize you with an Abraxo bath.  Let’s go east, should be a settlement not too far away we can coerce into letting us stay.”

Opal shuffled off behind him, still unimpressed with the level of mean in his teasing.  He’d never been quite so pointed, before.   _Maybe that’s just how he decompresses._  She quickened her pace to catch up and walk next to him.

“Don’t you want to know what I found out?  I met the scientist, Virgil.”

“What did he say?”  MacCready took a drag on a cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of his mouth.

Opal recounted her entire trip and experience within the Glowing Sea. She described Virgil’s explanation on how they could break into the Institute, as best she could.  “He used a bunch of big words, but basically we just have to get the chip that will let us ride the frequency into the Institute.”

MacCready chuckled.  “What?”

“I don’t know, some similarity to a radio and air waves or whatever.  Who cares?  He assured me it would work, it just wouldn’t be easy.”

It was midafternoon by the time they walked onto Somerville Place. MacCready waved to the settlers as they approached.  It appeared to be a single homestead, with a garden, and not much else.  

“Dad!” cried one of the children in alarm in response to MacCready’s friendly gesture.

“Great,” he sighed.  

“What?” Opal replied.

“They’re gonna ask us for help.”

“Hi, there,” called a middle-aged, Hispanic man from the front doorway. “Y’all mercenaries?”

“Told you,” MacCready murmured in Opal’s ear.  “Yes.  You know that means we don’t work for free, right?”

“I…I know.  Listen, we don’t have much, but we’ll give you whatever we can if you will just help us out.  Please.”

MacCready and Opal exchanged a look.  Opal was inclined to agree, based on confirmed payment, which she really wanted to include a bath and a bed.  Her body ache just got worse as they walked on and she craved a real, deep rest. “Tell us what you need, first.”

“There’s some raiders, they…they usually leave us alone, we don’t have enough here for them to bother taking and we definitely don’t have, you know… _drugs_ …”  The settler said the last word tenderly, as though he were saying a swear word in front of delicate ears.  “Last time, my eldest came out of the house after dark to get some milk for her baby brother, who was sick, and they…they just took her.”  He swallowed hard.

Opal exhaled.  Stories of lost or kidnapped children always hit them both where it counted.  She knew they’d both have a hard time turning the job down, outright, based on that.  “Listen,” she began softly, “we…we’ll take the job.  But you gotta understand that we’ve had a rough couple of days, we’re exhausted, and honestly not in any condition to run a job right now.”

The man’s relief was almost palpable.  “Of course, yes, I understand.  Please, come in.  Jordan! Put some water in the kettle to get these people a bath,” he called into the house, turning his back on them and marshalling his other children to help prepare some accommodation.

“Atta girl,” MacCready purred.  “Looks like I’ve taught you _something._ ”

Opal was far too tired to muster a response.

The man reappeared in the doorway and waved them inside.  “You can use my daughter’s room, it’s not huge, but you’ll get privacy and a place to put your feet up.  There’s, uh, only the one bed, though…” he trailed off, awkwardly.

“That’s no problem,” MacCready assured him as the pair followed the man up the stairs.

“I can find another bedroll, if…ah, oh, yes, I see,” he interrupted himself once he caught the expression on MacCready’s face.  “Merc marrieds, huh?  I can only imagine how exciting that life could be.”

“We’re n—oof!” Opal was elbowed in the gut mid-word.   MacCready gave her a short shake of his head.

“Sorry?” the man turned and gave Opal a curious look.

“I was saying, we’re not going to be picky about accommodations.”  She flicked her gaze towards MacCready and gave her best _we will talk about this later_ look.

“Life on the road, I get it.  This is the room, here, bathroom just down the hall.  Tub should be ready in a little bit for ya’s, please, just make yourselves at home.”

“Thanks.  I’m O…phelia and this is Mitchell.”

“Eric.  Glad to meet you both.  We can talk later on about the details, I want y’all to be comfortable, first. Please join the rest of the family for dinner, if you’d like.”  He shook each of their hands, gave a solid nod, then retreat down the hallway and back down the stairs.

Opal stepped into the tidy, modestly furnished bedroom.  The window featured only a single panel of curtain and looked out onto the back of the estate, which was really no more than additional garden and the tool shed.  There was a dresser that used to house three drawers, but only now had one, a small vanity with a cracked mirror and accompanying stool, and of course, the bed. She pried her boots off with her toes, while MacCready set down their bag and his rifle, then began removing his own extraneous layers.

“Ophelia, huh?  Not bad. What prompted you to drop some fake names?”  He stretched his arms out, his fingers locked together, popping his elbows and his knuckles.

“First of all, if we get to the job and decide it’s suicide, we can bail with no damage to our reputation.  Second, if the Gunners are still sniffing around for you, it won’t be obvious you’re taking jobs on their turf, as they said.”  Opal perched on the bed, stretched out her legs, then rotated her ankles and relished the resultant pops.  “No?”

MacCready grinned and shook his head.  “Damn, sometimes you just come outta nowhere.”

“Thanks, _Mitch_.”

There was a light knock on the door.  “Bath’s drawn and ready, folks.”

“Thank you,” MacCready called in response.  Opal waited until the footsteps had fallen away before speaking.

“Does this guy not think we could rob him blind and murder him and his family? Why is he just nice?”

“Of course he does.  He lives in the same world as everyone else. For whatever reason, he still thinks it’s better to be kind.”  MacCready shrugged, popping his shoulders in the process.  His face clouded and he offered nothing more.

The bath felt like heaven.  All her sore muscles and joints seemed to collectively sigh in relief as Opal sunk herself lower and lower in the hot water.  It had that faint sulphur smell of water pumped up from a well, but she didn’t care. _It’s not like I haven’t smelled worse things._  She sighed contentedly, closing her eyes, listening to the sounds of Eric and his children finishing their chores for the evening, outside and below.  The water lapped gently against the ancient ceramic tub, a soothing rhythm that helped relax her mind as much as her body.  

She emerged from the tub feeling new, or at least, renewed.  Her skin and hair were scrubbed of all accumulated skin secretions and outside dirt and grime, and were the cleanest they had been in several days.   Opal peeked out of the bathroom, made sure the coast was clear, then tiptoed back to the room they were loaned with nothing but the thin towel around her body, her dirty clothing clutched in her hand.  She pounced into the room and closed the door behind her.  MacCready jostled awake.  He had perched himself on the vanity stool and leaned back against the wall, his hat over his eyes, for a quick nap.

“…well, hello, there.  Is this a dream?” he cooed.

“It’s better,” Opal smiled.  She quirked a shoulder.  “Come on over here.”  

MacCready tossed his hat onto the vanity and did exactly as instructed.  He wrapped his arms around her waist and back and leaned down to kiss her deeply.  She shuddered in his arms, feeling warm, safe, and happy.  It felt like it had been too long since they shared an intimate moment such as that, and she moaned in her enjoyment of it.  Opal reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling his head closer, pushing her tongue into his mouth deeper.  Her towel opened, no longer held shut, and MacCready lifted his hands just enough for it to tumble to the floor.  He placed his hands back on her body and began to caress her curves, slowly, up and down.

Opal started working her hands down his body in turn, her fingers grasping the sides of his undershirt and slowly pulling it up and over his head. He reached up into her hair, his fingers rubbing into her scalp and getting tangled in her damp hair.  He hummed as their lips met once more, both of them enjoying their extended kiss.  He smelled as wonderful as ever.  His bare chest against hers felt rough, but warm, and clammy, as his body began to sweat while their intimacy intensified.

MacCready stepped forward to pin her against the wall with his body, breaking their kiss and sighing.  “Sweet mercy,” he breathed, planting a line of kisses down her face from her temple, to her cheek, then down her neck.  “You sure got my engine running.”  He reached up to caress one of her breasts while planting sweet, gentle kisses on her neck.

“So,” she sighed back, reaching down to unbutton his trousers, “why don’t we drive?”

“Hmm?  What?”

Opal replied by kissing him once more.

“In here?  Right now? On the kid’s bed?”  MacCready’s voice went up higher and higher with each question.

“We don’t have to use the bed,” Opal purred, continuing to loosen and push down his pants.

MacCready paused from kissing down the other side of her neck and softly grinding his crotch against her.  “How do you mean?”

“Mmm…ahh, you know…”  Opal turned around, then gave him a wicked smile over her shoulder.

He scratched his nails up and down her back, then leaned towards her ear. “I really don’t.”

_Is he really so innocent?_  “I lean like this,” she pushed her backside out, making him take a step backwards, “and then it’s business as usual.”

“I…oh, I see.”  His hands traced back up the front of her body to rest on her breasts.  He wiggled his hips slightly to stabilize his footing and the angle, and they both sighed as he pushed himself inside her.  Opal braced her arms against the wall, her body responding to the stimulation and pleasure.  Her heart started beating faster, her crotch becoming wetter with sweat and her natural lubrication.  “Sweet mercy,” he repeated.  He leaned forward to rest his chin on the top of her shoulder, pulling himself in and out, slowly.  She sighed and moaned with each motion, feeling the thrill of the tease, along with the pure pleasure of the slick sex inside of her.  MacCready nipped at her earlobe and began to move faster.

“Oh, Mac,” she sang dreamily. He responded by biting down on her earlobe a little harder and pressing his chest against her.  The smell of his sweat and skin was strong, enveloping her senses, intensifying her arousal even higher.  His breath felt hot against her face and carried a faint trace of tobacco.

“Tell me how good it is,” he purred into her ear.  “Tell me.”

“So good,” she breathed.

“Again.”

“It’s so good, Mac, so good, so good,” she moaned.

“You love it, don’t you?” he egged her on.  MacCready squeezed her breasts just a little harder, for emphasis. “Tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“God, yes, Mac, I love it.”

“Yes, you do,” he grinned, never breaking rhythm.  He was sweating freely, dripping onto her body from his chin, and chest.  “I know you do.  I’m amazing.”

Opal responded with another moan.  She wanted so badly to wrap her arms around his body, scratch her nails up and down his back while he continued to thrust deliciously into her body, but the positioning was solid and feeling pinned against the wall seemed to add an additional excitement to the experience that she hadn’t expected.  

MacCready started to moan, his voice sounding increasingly eager. Suddenly he sighed, and his leg twitched.  They both shivered.  He wrapped his arms around her body and rest his head on her shoulder once more. Neither spoke, simply enjoying the closeness of their embrace, their heart rates beginning to slow, together. Opal felt satisfied, relaxed, and suddenly very tired.  She turned, then, and kissed MacCready once more.  When they pulled away, his eyes were dancing with some gushy look that made her blush.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Oh, yes.  Better than that,” she said, again, thinking herself so clever.  “I think I will pass on dinner, though.  I’m feeling pretty tired.”

“You can’t.  We need to get our job debriefing, remember, Ophelia?”

Opal sighed.  “Can’t you just go do it?”

“You’re much more charming.”

They gathered for the evening meal in the former kitchen of the home, though it no longer featured any appliances, scrapped long ago for parts and circuitry.  Dinner was simple root vegetables cooked outside on a makeshift grill with boiled grain and salt.  It tasted better than anything they would have snacked on out of their pack, and Opal was grateful.   _I’m probably going to feel pretty bad if his kid is in an awful situation, after all this._

“Wonderful place you have here, Eric,” she complimented, taking a sip of her beer.  Eric and his two children, Jordan and Henry, all gave her a confused look.  The baby, Steven, merely babbled and smashed his carrots. She smiled, her eyes drifting towards MacCready, who gave her the slightest of head shakes.   _God damn, the 2077 is talking, again._  She cleared her throat and took another bite.

Eric pushed back his empty plate and launched into his story.  “Mindy, my daughter, was kidnapped three days ago.  I…can’t remember what time it was.  It was during the night.  Steven was crying, she offered to get him some fresh milk for his bottle to try and help him sleep.  When she didn’t come back in, I came out to look for her, and found the lantern and the empty bottle sitting in the dirt.”  

“How do you know it was the raiders, then?” MacCready asked, piling his boiled grain on his plate like a toddler.

“They’d been by many times, one of them talked to Mindy more than once. She would ignore them or just tell them to leave her alone.  Raiders make no sense, they have no rules.  If they decided they wanted to have her, they _would_ just take her.”

“Mac and I will check it out.  It’s not a bad place to check on your first instinct, but we can’t promise she’ll be there, either,” Opal replied before MacCready could incite the man further.

Eric nodded, relieved.

“I thought his name was Mitchell,” chirped Henry.

Opal blinked at the child.  “What?”

“You called him ‘Mac.’  But daddy said his name was Mitchell.”

Opal could feel MacCready tense up from across the table.  She smiled warmly at Henry and picked up her beer once more.  “Oh, of course.  I call him ‘Mac’ as a pet name.”

“What’s that?” Jordan’s turn to ask a question.

Opal made a show of looking between Eric and Jordan before answering. “It’s kind of like a nick name for people in a couple.  Maybe your dad can tell you, sometime.”

“Sometimes, I call Ophelia –“

“Mitch, shush!”

MacCready snickered and took a sip of his own beer.  “Anyways, Eric, where do you think the raiders are holed up?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re a little further up the river.  I don’t know how many there really are.  I’m sorry I don’t have more to offer.”  Eric’s shoulders fell.  He looked exhausted.  Henry stood up and began to gather the plates

“We’ll head out first thing in the morning.”  MacCready stood from the table and Opal followed.

“Goodnight,” she said to Eric.

The morning was overcast, a thick layer of grey cloud blanketed the sky and the breeze was fresh.  There was a distinct spring in MacCready’s step as they made their way down the hill to the riverbank proper.  Opal’s joints were still sore in a few places, but she seemed to be mostly recovered from her two-day trek in power armour and she still felt clean from her bath the day before.

“You’re in a good mood,” she cooed.

“You bet.  It’s been too long since I’ve had a good raider sweep.”  He grinned, and made a little gun with his hand.  “Pop, pop!  Hope you didn’t need that kneecap, you strung out bastard!”

Opal smiled and shook her head.  A mirelurk hatchling skittered out of the mud towards her, but she just kicked it into the river and kept walking.  “What are you thinking?  Mindy going to turn up?”

MacCready shrugged.  

The pair made their way north along the riverbank.  MacCready pointed out a smouldering fire pit and some crude tents arranged on a sandy outcrop that reached into the river.  They crept as quietly as they could along the edge of the water.  There was a lack of cover that made MacCready nervous.  Opal scanned the area.  Empty alcohol bottles and drug paraphernalia were strewn about.  No one was awake.  Suddenly she reached out and grabbed MacCready by the arm.  Sprawled out on her back under a poorly pitched tarp was a sleeping, fresh-faced Hispanic girl.  Mindy was a few tents in but at least on the outer edge.  Opal hoped they could rouse and retrieve her without causing a ruckus.

“Cover me,” she whispered.  Opal crept over to Mindy’s tent.  She glanced back at MacCready, who nodded.  She leaned down and gently shook Mindy on the arm.  “Mindy, hey Mindy, wake up.”

Mindy mumbled, her eyes fluttering, but she didn’t wake.

“Mindy!” Opal tried again, her voice a little heavier.

Mindy yawned, then opened her eyes.  “Huh?  Yeah, what?” she drawled sleepily.

“Your dad sent us.  Come on, get up, we’ll bring you home before the rest of the animals wake up.”  Opal offered her hand.

“What?” Mindy repeated, sitting up, but quite groggy yet.  “My dad?”

“Probably still high,” MacCready muttered.

“Yeah, your dad.  Remember? Your brothers?  Your family has been worried about you.  Come on, let’s get going.”  Opal thought she saw some movement in the tent across from the fire pit and began to feel anxious.

“Oh.”  Mindy laid back down and rolled over, her back to the pair.

Opal and MacCready exchanged a look.  “Aren’t you coming?”

“Of course not,” the girl yawned.  “I ran away.”  She lifted her arm and waved them off.  “Get lost.”

Opal couldn’t believe it.  Eric didn’t suggest his eldest child was a total brat.  She leaned down to hiss into the girl’s ear.  “You need to come home, and you need to do it right now.”

Mindy turned to look at Opal, a haughty smile on her face.  “I’m not going home.  I told you, I ran away.  I made my dad think I got kidnapped when out to get Steven his bottle.  I’m not going back to that shitty, boring life. Digging, taking care of my brothers, it’s the _worst_.”  She turned back around and closed her eyes.  “Get lost, or I’ll scream.”

Opal was at a loss for words.  She had no idea what to tell Eric.  

“Whatever, you little snot,” MacCready drawled into Mindy’s ear.  “Oh, and by the way, we had sex in your bed.”

Mindy’s jaw dropped, but the pair had slipped away before she could say anything. They retreated as quickly as they could in the wet sand and into the overgrown brush along the banks.  They watched the camp for several moments. Satisfied that no one had stirred, they slipped out of the brush and climbed up the bank to head back to the ruined road.

“You’re a brat,” Opal giggled, punching MacCready in the arm.  “We could have used the bed, after all.”

MacCready flushed slightly.  “I enjoyed our improvisation.”

“What do we tell her dad?”

“We tell him what we found out.  If he wants to get himself killed trying to haul her back to the farm, well, that’s his choice.  Our job is done.”

“S-she what?” Eric exclaimed.  He fell back to lean against the doorway.

“Yeah, you probably should have been sitting down for that,” MacCready snarked, lighting up a smoke.

“Sorry, Eric.”  Opal reached out and gently touched the man’s arm.  “Is that for us?”  She motioned to a small basket of vegetables with some milk gathered by the door.

“Yeah.  Thanks, anyway.  Look, I need to go, Steven will be awake soon.”  Eric wiped a tear from his eye, turned, and entered the house.  MacCready unceremoniously dumped the food into their bag and slung it over his shoulder.  They made their way to the road and head north once more, bearing toward their own journey and the CIT ruins.

“What do you think is going to happen to Mindy?”

“She’ll either overdose, or someone will shoot her by accident, or she’ll fall into the river when she’s drunk and drown, or, she’ll run home to daddy as soon as her new friends get tired of her freeloading and want her to earn her keep.”

“Geez, Mac, can your heart bleed any more?”

MacCready shrugged.  “She’s sixteen.  Where I grew up, you were kicked out into the world on your sixteenth birthday, no exceptions.” He threw his head back and blew smoke out toward the sky.  “We all gotta face the wasteland at some point.”

His words rang loudly in her ears.  She knew he was right.


	5. Chapter 5

Opal and MacCready sat heavily onto the benches in the locker room.  Somehow they had survived “the Gauntlet” and found themselves about to take on some lunatic called Colter.  Opal could hardly conceive of the number of scratches, knicks, and bruises she had acquired during their dash through the evil trial. She was stinging in all sorts of places and really pissed off.

“The end is in sight, babe.  We’ll get this guy Colter put in his place, and then get the hell out of this dump.” MacCready knelt in front of her and was dabbing her face with a cloth.  He pulled it back from her nose with a bloody stain on it.

Opal said nothing.  It had been months of struggle, high stress, and subterfuge, culminating in the full destruction of the Institute.  She had been completely confident in the path that had been chosen, until Shaun’s final parting words while she escaped.  He spat and cursed at her, but even through that, she could see his emotional pain. Ultimately, though, the reality was he was much more distressed over the idea that his home and his life’s work was coming down around his ears, rather than the realization he would never be able to build a relationship with his estranged mother, and that the Institute had caused it.

She became deeply depressed.  MacCready took her back to Sanctuary, thinking if she were able to settle back into her home, she’d be more comfortable grieving there than anywhere else. Instead, she spent days in Shaun’s ruined nursery, drinking wine straight out of the bottle, avoiding herself and avoiding the world.  The floodgate had finally lifted, and all the sadness, stress, and grief she’d been carrying at arm’s length in order to survive would no longer remain at bay. She spent hours weeping, curled up in an alcohol-soaked mess, unable to stop.  MacCready never faltered in his support, but found himself quite helpless after a while, as well.

At some point, she woke up to the sound of MacCready and Preston Garvey having an argument outside the house.

“She _needs_ to sober up, to have a clear head and figure out the direction of her new life,” Preston said in that annoying, haughty tone he used constantly.

“Shove it, Preston.  You hardly know her, and you definitely don’t know what’s best for her, right now.  You don’t know what she’s been through.”

Opal rubbed her face.  Her skin was swollen and damp with sweat.

“Maybe that’s true.  What I do know is she’s spent nearly three weeks drunk off her ass feeling sorry for herself, and you’re enabling it.”

There was a scuffle.  “Preston, I am only going to warn you once, not to ever shove me, again.”  There was a thud, then a howl from Preston.  A few moments later, she heard MacCready enter the house.  He stepped into the room carrying two bottles of wine and cradling a radio in his other arm. “Oh, hey, babe.  You’re awake.”  He leaned over to kiss the top of her head, before setting down his menagerie. “I brought you the radio.”

“I heard Preston, just now,” she sighed.

“Ah,” he replied, softly.  “Don’t let that dumbass make you feel bad.  He’s got his own issues blaming himself for the near destruction of the Minutemen, and probably more than a little crush on you, so he feels like he has to try and ‘save’ you or something.  I kicked him in the shin.”  MacCready flicked the switch on the radio and began fiddling with the tuning dial.  “I know you’ll come through this, because I’m here for you.”

“Stop there,” she interrupted him.  A catchy, sugary-sweet jingle crackled through the single speaker.

“What is it?”

Her eyes took on a nostalgic sparkle.  “Nuka World…these are the commercials from before.  I didn’t think it would still be there!”

She cleaned herself up, and the next day, they set out.  Neither had any idea their dream distraction would turn into a complete horror of a nightmare.  

“Hold still, just a sec.  There’s a piece of glass in your…face.”  MacCready reached forward and pulled a small shard out of her forehead.

“Ugh,” she winced.  “Shrapnel from that one grenade I probably set off.  Or second.  Or ninth…” Opal sniffed.  “Here, pass me that.”  She took the bloodied rag from his hand and dabbed at MacCready’s face.  A gash stretching from just below his right jaw, across his cheek and the side of his pointed nose was still bleeding freely. An angry tear ran down her face as she sopped up the mess.

Ever sarcastic, MacCready tried to lighten the mood.  “ _None_ of this was in the brochure.  I want to complain to the manager and get our money back.”

“Then we go straight to the Better Business Bureau, get this place shut down.”

“Hell, yes!  That’s my girl.”

“Find ourselves some lawyers, sue the pants off –“

“You dipshits in there?”  Opal was interrupted by a deep, growly voice through an intercom attached to the wall nearby.  “I need to talk to you.  That is, if you’re interested in staying alive for another twenty minutes.”

MacCready waved Opal down and approached the intercom.  “Takes one to know one!  What do you want?”

Opal bit her lip.  She stood to join MacCready, smiled gently at him, then leaned forward to press the TALK button and motioned for him to repeat.  

“What is it, turd brain?” he asked instead, too embarrassed.

“You watch your fucking mouth, Thumbelina.  There ain’t much time before Colter expects to smear your blood and guts all over the arena, so listen up.  Around the corner in the bottom of one of those lockers is the key to winning this fight.”  

Opal investigated and found nothing but a plastic water gun.  She returned to the intercom and jabbed the TALK button with her thumb.  “Is this a joke, or is the real gun somewhere else?”

There was a delay in response.  Opal tried again.  “Hello? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here, princess.  Had to take a second to bang my head against the wall over how stupid you are.  Did I _sound_ like I was joking?”

Opal raised her eyebrows, glanced at MacCready, then back down to the red, faded, Nuka-branded water pistol in her gashed and bleeding hands.

“The fight is _rigged_. Does that make sense to your simple brains?  It means Colter has it set up so that he never loses.  His power armour is hooked up to the grid of the arena, completely charged up and basically invincible to everything.  Bullets, sledgehammers, all of it.   _Except_ for that little wonder you’ve got in your dangerous, dirty paws, right there.”

“The water gun,” MacCready repeated into the intercom, careful to press the TALK button beforehand.

“Goddamn it – _yes_ , Thumbelina, didn’t I just fucking tell you that?  You splash him with the water, it shorts out the suit, and then you can hit it with real bullets like a normal person.  It’s the only way you’ll walk out of there alive.”

Opal and MacCready stared at each other, once more.  She exhaled, turning the water pistol in her hands.  “What do you think?”

A loud buzzer noise echoed through the room, and the other voice that had been taunting them over the speaker system through the course of the gauntlet rang out again.  The second voice was gone.

“It’s everyone’s favourite part of the gauntlet, the arena bloodbath! They dashed past the turrets, tiptoed through the traps, survived unbearable levels of radiation and yes, yet still, dodged your own bullets, to make it here.  Tiny and Tinier are a pair of slippery little assholes, aren’t they?”

The roar of an assembled crowd could be heard from down the hallway. They had run out of time.  Opal took a deep breath while MacCready reloaded his rifle.  “You hang back.  Don’t even come to the door with me.  It’ll throw them all off, expecting two of us.  I’ll get myself close enough to use this,” she wagged the water gun, “and when the suit shorts out, you do what you do best.”

“Do you think it will work?”

“I think we might as well try it, because we’re probably dead, no matter what.” Opal swallowed.

MacCready exhaled.  “Well, here goes nothing.”

Opal calmly made her way down the hallway and to the electronically controlled door, standing wide open.  The volume of the screaming crowd was nearly overwhelming. She could almost taste the bloodlust driving them to jeer, cat-call, and carry on so wildly.

“It seems Tiny and Tinier probably decided on one last fuck before having to die – oh, _there_ she is!  Sorry, Tinier, almost couldn’t see you, there.”  The voice on the speaker system seemed very pleased with his own sense of humour.  Opal had finally had enough of his bullshit and raised the middle finger of her left hand up above her head in response.  “Oh ho, _feisty_ , ain’t she, folks? We’ll see what the Overboss thinks of her attitude.”

The crowd booed.  She gave them the finger, too.  She didn’t care, anymore.  Suddenly, they cheered. Opal turned her attention back into the ruined bumper cars attraction and saw something that looked like it had come out of a pre-war science fiction movie.  Standing on the other side of the room was a power armour suit, but connected by thick wires on its helmet into the grid attached to the ceiling.  The hair on her head stood straight up as something began to power up, and she watched as the whole room began to glow in the electric blue light coming from the grid and thread through the wires and the power armour, itself.  Dramatic static electricity bolts cracked and snapped between the grid and the suit.

“You even _need_ that weapon, Overboss? Looks like you could squash Tinier between your finger and your thumb, am I right?” taunted the speaker-voice. Some of the crowd laughed.

The whirring sound of the suit cycling up filled the room.  “I might just break her spine over my metal crotch!” the man, allegedly called Colter, replied.

Opal had had enough with the misogynist comedy.  She ran straight into the room and directly towards the glowing blue suit.  The crowd erupted in response.  Colter lifted his right arm and took a swipe at her, but Opal had skid to a stop and dodged, easily.  

His recovery time was unlike anything Opal had ever seen.  The electric enhancement seemed to improve movement speed, and she nearly didn’t dodge the second swipe fast enough.  She slipped in between two of the bumper cars lying motionless for centuries in an attempt to slow him down enough that she could get behind him.  As she hopped out from behind the back of the car closest to Colter, he laughed like an evil villain, squat, then lifted the car with both his hands and pushed it at her. She scrambled, unsure of which direction to take to dodge, and got lucky – the car, instead of being thrown at her, merely flipped over at her feet.

The crowd laughed.  Colter, enraged, roared through his helmet and took off towards her at full speed. Opal yelped and scrambled yet again to get out of the way.  On the other side of the room, some of the ruined cars had been stacked on top of each other.  She didn’t bother wondering how and made a dash towards them, hoping the suit would make it too hard for him to climb up after her.  She turned and pointed the water gun towards the glowing suit from the top.

Colter laughed again.  “What’ve you got there?  A toy?”

Opal tried to steady her hand as best she could.  She squeezed the trigger of the water gun and watched a trickle of water sprinkle to her feet.  Colter, and the crowd, laughed.  The sound echoed throughout the chamber, causing her ears to ring.

“I don’t get it,” she muttered to herself.  She held the water gun up to her ear and shook it.  The responding sloshing sound indicated it was, indeed, “loaded.”  “Why didn’t it –“  Opal interrupted herself with her own scream as Colter swung his steel-clad arm and knocked her off the cars like a feather.  She landed hard on the ground, feeling a snap in her left shoulder, her head bouncing against the floor, but what was truly worse was watching the water gun slide across the floor, under some ruined carts, and completely out of reach.

She moaned, her head throbbing.  Colter approached and kicked her in the gut, winding her painfully. Opal gasped and wheezed, clutching her abdomen with one arm, sliding and scraping with her legs and other arm to push herself away.  He shoved her back onto the floor with his foot and stood onto her injured shoulder. Opal cried out in pain, wiggling and squirming to get free.

“Anyone reminded of radroaches, right about now?” cackled the voice through the speakers.

A single shot thundered from behind her, a sound she would recognize anywhere.  MacCready’s bullet sliced through the external wiring connecting the foot standing on top of her, and its shin.  There was a pop, like the sound of a lightbulb breaking, and the foot went dark. Opal smiled, in spite of herself. Colter attempted to move his foot, but it had shorted out and was no longer following his direction.  Just as Opal was about to say something witty, it jerked irratically and clocked her in the face, before throwing the rest of its body off balance and causing it to fall backwards.

“Son of a -!” she screamed.

“Get the water gun, now!” bellowed MacCready.

Opal leaned over to spit out a tooth and some blood, before pushing herself back to her feet and running off toward the last place she saw the water gun. Her entire head was throbbing, with the addition of her cheek feeling swollen and her mouth filling with blood. She felt frantically beneath the defunct bumper cars, found something smooth and hard, and triumphantly pulled out a forearm bone with a hand still attached.  “Son of a,” she repeated, throwing the bones away angrily and watching them break apart against the wall.  Colter had taken to some kind of bear crawl towards MacCready, who kept aiming at exposed wires.  She ducked again, this time clicking on her Pip Boy light to help her locate the water gun beneath the cars.

“The Tiny Terrors don’t give up too quickly, do they?  I guess when you’re midget, you gotta spend your life fighting for it!  Don’t worry, you adorable little munchkins, Overboss is gonna squash you good and soon!”

“You’re next on my list to die, motherfucker,” Opal muttered to herself, straining her reach as far as she could to get a hold of the water pistol. MacCready fired off another shot that grazed Colter’s armour and skimmed the top of her head.  Convinced she had finally got a hold of the water pistol, she pulled it out and found herself indeed successful.  She jumped and whipped herself around, and instantly regret it, feeling dizzy and nauseous.  She pointed the pistol towards Colter with both hands, her eyes squeezed shut, willing the dizzy spell to pass, and fast.

“SHOOT HIM!” bellowed MacCready.

Opal stood, her vision blurry, and her hands shaking uncontrollably. She took a few steps towards the glowing blue armour, and a deep breath.

“It’s just a water gun!  Shoot him, dammit, shoot him!”  MacCready’s voice was shrill, and desperate.

Opal pointed the water pistol and pulled the plastic trigger over, and over, and over.  The pressure inside the toy seemed to build appropriately and the water began shooting out in a sharper stream, but landed a little wildly due to her hands shaking so badly.  She clamped her teeth together in an attempt to focus her aim and continued to shoot.

The crowd roared.  Opal ignored them.  The water had begun to make contact with what seemed like important parts of the electronic mechanics of the powered suit.  It started to splutter, hiss, and pop, as the components began to short out.  She didn’t let up.  Some in the crowd slowly began to understand what was happening and began to boo.  The suit finally let out a large puff of smoke with a gigantic, echoing crack, and suddenly all the electric blue lighting in the grid and the suit snuffed out. Colter twitched and jerked, his movements appearing involuntary as his arms and legs flung out in various directions while he laid on the floor, flat on his face.

Opal dragged herself over to his convulsing body.  MacCready shot him in both arms, causing Colter to shriek in pain, much to her delight.  She stepped up onto his back and kicked his helmet off with her heel.  “Let us go,” she growled into his ear.

Colter barked out a laugh.  “You have no fucking clue, do ya, doll?”

Opal took a fist full of his greasy, nappy hair, pulled his head back, and spat a mixture of saliva and blood into his face.  “I don’t fucking care what you’re talking about.  Let us go.  We don’t want to play, anymore.”

Colter laughed again, his shoulders twitching in unnatural ways.  “This lot be _raiders_ , you idiotic cunt.  We don’t just let people g—“

Opal plunged her bladed knuckles into Colter’s neck, or at least, what was exposed of it.  His blood sprayed like a geyser straight out from the puncture, spraying both his face and up onto hers.  Opal gagged and sputtered, spitting in a panicked fashion.  She slid off his back to the floor, his armour still twitching involuntarily, blood beginning to pool underneath it.

The house was silent.  Opal was overcome with sobs, feeling as though she could barely breathe.  Never before had she felt so scared, so _trapped_ , that she was certain she were going to die. Instead, she lived, and her greatest adversary yet lay twitching at her feet.  MacCready silently stepped over to where she was and held her tight.

“Well I’ll be the bastard son of a promiscuous deathclaw – Colter is dead, I repeat, that motherfucker Colter is dead, and folks, we have a new Overboss!”

Twenty minutes later, Opal was sitting on a chair propped outside the other door of the arena, tenderly prodding her swollen cheek.  The crowd had been dismissed and made themselves scarce within seconds.  She hunched herself over, staring at the floor, willing herself not to be sick. Her head was spinning and throbbing and her shoulder ached, on top of the other injuries sustained while she and MacCready had run the gauntlet.  She had been through a number of high stress, adrenaline-fueled situations before, but none had ever left her feeling as though her body were simply about to fall apart.

Opal twisted and vomited onto the floor.  She let out a grimace as she sat up and leaned her head back against the windowpane, closing her eyes against the lighting that seemed to just make her headache even worse.  A familiar footfall approached from down the hallway.

“I found some bandages, but all the first aid kits seem to have been picked clean eons ago,” MacCready said as he knelt next to her.  “Geez…”

“How bad is it?” she gargled.

“’You should see the other guy,’ kind of bad, and we know what happened to him.”

“Fuck.”  Opal lifted her arm to cover her eyes, the added darkness providing some instant relief.

“Are you able to get up?  We should get out of here and figure out how we’re going to get home.”

“Step off, Thumbelina, I’ve got this one.”  It was the second voice, from the intercom.  A sharp pain stabbed into her neck, causing Opal to sit up and gasp in surprise.  Just as soon as the needle was removed, numbing relief began to settle her headache and her nausea subsided as well.  She opened her eyes to find herself face to face with a large, very muscular man in heavy armour adorned with assorted spikes, and an eye patch made out of a piece of metal.  He turned and tossed the empty syringe into the nearby trash can.  “Don’t particularly condone chems, but they have a use in certain situations.”

“Wh…what was that?” Opal asked thickly.  Her swollen jaw didn’t make it easy to talk.

“Just a little pop of Med-X, princess.”  He laughed.  “Damn. Colter tossed you around like a rag doll, and it shows.”

“Back off, you psycho,” MacCready growled, reaching his arm out to separate the man and Opal.  “I think you’ve all done enough.  We won your stupid game and we’re leaving.”

The man laughed again.  “You talk of the game, but don’t know the rules, Thumbelina –“

“It’s _MacCready_.”

The man paused.  “Huh.  Seems I’ve heard of you.  Well, while we’re doing introductions, I’m Porter Gage.” Gage turned his gaze back to Opal. “Your turn.”

“What do you want?” Opal asked, instead.

Gage chuckled.  “A bitch who means business.  Not a bad start.”  He leaned against the wall and studied her for a few moments.  “There’s a lot to explain.  Taking a walk is a good idea.  Up for it?”

Opal took a deep breath.  She gently pushed herself up and off the chair.  Her body felt creaky, but there was no pain.  It was surreal.

“Lead the way,” MacCready mumbled.  Gage grunted and led them down the hall and out of the arena.  Opal wobbled some, her limbs feeling fuzzy, but she remained steady.  Gage flung one of the main doors open and the three stepped outside.  Her eyes widened at the sight of the large, intact, Nuka World marquee.  The light of the setting sun bounced off its edges in such a way that it seemed to glow, all on its own.

“Wow,” she drawled, entranced.

Gage smirked.  MacCready gently took her by the elbow and coaxed her to keep walking.  She managed to keep her balance down the ruined stairs, but had to concentrate on the actual mechanics of walking.  The Med-X certainly had dissolved her pain and nausea, but her joints felt thicker as the moments passed.

Gage was talking as they moved.  He described Nuka World as being occupied by three gangs, each with their own leader, and a fragile truce keeping them from full on civil war.  “A year ago, I gave Colter the job of being the Overboss.  Together we convinced all three gangs to join up, stomp out the traders, and claim the park as our own.  Problem was, a year later, Colter was fucking around with nonsense tasks, like that gauntlet you just dragged yourselves through, to try and entertain the gangs, rather than do the fucking work to get the rest of the park in occupational order.”

“So, the raiders are all fighting over who-gets-to-crap-where and there’s only one can.  Sorry to hear it.”  MacCready’s sarcasm was heavy.  “We’re not plumbers.  Tell us how to get out of here and we’ll go back to where we came from.”

“No plumbing necessary.  Well, what I _mean_ is, well whatever. Point is, Colter got fired, and you, princess, are hired.”  Gage pressed a bright red button that called down a rickety cable elevator.  “Though I guess I should be calling you Boss, Boss.” They stepped onto the platform and Gage pressed another red button, this one located on the side of the elevator. It jerked upwards in a jostling start. Opal, her joints still feeling the side effect of the Med-X, was unprepared, and flailed to keep from tumbling off the elevator.  Both Gage and MacCready snapped a hand out to grab her.

“I’ve got her,” MacCready growled.

“Yeah, sure, Romeo.  Good job back there, keeping her from getting smashed in the face, too.”

“You psychos and your gauntlet are the reason we’re both messed up in the first place!”

_Oh, God.  Are they…fighting about me?_   _Why?_  Opal pulled out of Gage’s grip and leaned back against the rail. “I’m okay.”  MacCready gave her arm a slight squeeze before letting it go.

The elevator clunked to a stop.  The three stepped into the former bar, repurposed into an apartment of sorts.  Opal was momentarily side tracked by the view. From the top of the man-made mountain, she could see most of the rest of the pre-war amusement park.  Some of the larger structures remained intact.  Each of the parks seemed to follow a certain aesthetic and theme, with the shape and colour of the buildings matching each other within the area.

“All that’s under your control now, Boss.  We just need to go out there and get our hands dirty in reclaiming it. The rest of the gangs take care of all yer other needs, mostly by hijacking caravans and passing settlers. Once we get the gangs playing, er, _together_ again, that’s when the real operation kicks in – and when we really start raking in the cash.”  Gage crossed his arms.  “The way you performed today, I think you’ll pull it off, too.”

“News flash, Cyclops – and I mean, some of us might cut you some slack because you’re only getting _half_ the picture – but if we wanted to carve out a piece of wasteland for ourselves, we’d just go do it.  It’s not as if we aren’t surrounded by it,” MacCready interjected.  He was digging dirt out from underneath his fingernails, an odd habit Opal had never seen him do, before.

Gage turned and gave MacCready a shove.  “I’ve had enough of your goddamn _sass_ , Thumbelina.  You start showin’ some respect, or at least, some fucking modesty, an’ fast, or you’re gonna see how long it takes to fly from the top of the mountain and onto the ground.  I ain’t got time for any more bullshit, or any more posers.”  He turned to Opal, his expression softening, but only slightly. “The job is yours, there’s no other option.  Period. We need to start planning what that looks like.”

Opal’s thought processes were beginning to feel as fuzzy as her joints and limbs.  The men were staring at her, waiting for her response, but all she could do was stare back. So much had happened, in such a short amount of time.  An unclouded mind would surely have difficulty processing everything, let alone one in her altered state.  She swallowed hard, a dry lump sitting in her throat.  “Can I go to bed?” she asked, her numb and swollen cheek and jaw making it difficult to even get the words out of her mouth.  

“Over here,” MacCready took her by the hand and led her to the far corner of the room, where the previous occupant had set up the bed.  He made a point of turning the mattresses over before replacing the thin covers.   Opal made no fuss about peeling off her leather jumpsuit while MacCready held the door open for Gage.  “We’ll talk later.”

“Goodnight, Boss,” Gage called over to Opal, but she paid it no attention. Sleep swept through her body in no time.


	6. Chapter 6

They argued for two days straight.  The intensity of her emotions were likely fed by her pain and fatigue, but Opal wouldn’t let up.  MacCready somehow refused to understand that there seemed to be a fine line between being a mercenary, and just taking what you want, when you want it.  Both jobs resulted in the loss of life for some kind of pay load.

He simply would not be swayed.  MacCready spent hours yelling, and eventually, pleading, for Opal to just ditch the raiders and return home with him.  He would insist that as a team, as a _partnership,_ it was best for them to let the raiders to their gangs and have no part of it.  Opal countered that they could make just as much money, or more, running as the raider Overboss, and that securing Nuka World would provide many strategic advantages over anything they would go back to, or establish, in the main Commonwealth.

Porter Gage spent his time on the other side of the room, listening, smirking, but otherwise saying nothing.

Neither would concede to the other’s points.  Both insisted they were acting in their best interests.  “I’ve met the gang leaders, Mac.  They aren’t what you imagine they are.  They have cunning, respect, agendas.  They aren’t just tricked out on cheap chems and looting and pillaging aimlessly – they have drive and ambition.  They all want a piece of the park to turn into their own, to start becoming a real presence in the Commonwealth and beyond.”

“Are you even _listening_ to yourself, right now?  ‘Agendas?’ ‘ _Ambition_?’  The only thing any of them want to do is stick a knife in your back and call the place theirs,” MacCready raved.  They were well into the morning of the third day of this cyclical argument.  He had deep, dark circles underneath his eyes and looked far older than his age.  His face was scruffy; he hadn’t shaved since before they had left Sanctuary for Nuka World. MacCready idly scratched at the scab on his cheek, picking some off and causing it to bleed again, then sighed.  “Opal, I am done arguing with you.”

“You are, are you?” she seethed.  “Just giving up, then, huh?  Gonna walk out?”

“Oh for crying out loud, stop that, already, would you?”  He tipped his hat and ran his other hand through his hair.  “Babe, how many times do I have to say this?  I’m on your side!  I want better for us than to be living on the top of some pre-war manmade mountain, as arbitrary head of a bunch of drugged out psychos.”

Gage snorted from his perch on the other side of the room.  MacCready glowered at him.  “We know you’ve been dicking around the market, MacCready, canoodling with the traders. Did they put some ideas into your head?”

“Did anyone ask you, Cyclops?” MacCready spat back.  He turned his attention back to Opal.  “We’re a team, a set, aren’t we?  And…and, honestly…”  His voice dropped a notch or two, and took a step towards Opal, who was leaning against the old desk sitting in the room.  “I thought we were in this together.  That we were…together for a reason.  Building a life, a…a shared life.”

Opal could see how vulnerable he had to be feeling, and it was endearing.  Her demeanour softened, but her resolve did not.  “Mac, I want us to have a great life together, too.  A stable life.  This gig, here, it’s as stable as it will get.  Regular income, a place to settle down.  Isn’t that what you’ve wanted?  What you’ve dreamt about?”

MacCready closed his mouth, and swallowed.  He broke eye contact and looked towards his feet.  “Opal, there’s no way you ever thought I wanted any of that as the head leader of a group of raider gangs. 

Opal was quiet for a moment as well.  Finally, she sighed.  “I don’t know how you could willingly walk away from something this good, knowing first-hand what the world is like, out there.  I just don’t get how you don’t see we both want the same things, for each other.  Together.”

MacCready swallowed hard once more.  He frowned, deeply, then turned and crossed the room and started gathering his things. Opal watched him for a moment as he tossed his spare garments, ammo, and a few provisions into a bag, before hefting his sniper rifle across his back and striding towards the elevator to the ground.  “Where are you going?”

“You made a good suggestion, so yeah, I am walking out.  I’m going back to my regular life, without this raider crap.  If you’re smart, you’ll pick up the rest of your things and come with me, right now.”  He looked her dead in the eye.  Blood from his broken scab had left a trail down his face, and dried to a dark red.

Her stomach sank.  Her mouth flapped open and shut while she attempted to find a response.  Emotions overwhelmed her.   _How can he just stand there, threatening to just walk out of everything we have?  Everything we’ve been through?  How can he use that against me, right now?_  “Where are you going?” she repeated, dumbly.

“I…I just need some space. Some time to think.  And I think you do, too.”  MacCready turned and stepped on to the elevator.  They exchanged one final look before he clicked the button and descended out of sight.

Opal’s knees gave out and she sank down to sit on the desk.  It took her several moments to fully process the fact that MacCready had really just walked out on her.  Walked out on _them._   

_He put himself first, above everything, after all.  After all this time._  She blinked away tears as her mind replayed the image of him descending out of sight over, and over, and over.   Opal swallowed, a hard lump in her throat.  Suddenly, she jumped up and kicked one of the bar stools with all her might.  It was bolted to the floor, but the cushion spun, and her foot left a dent in the ancient aluminum.  Seeing the stool just stand there despite her rage spurred her anger further.  She roared and started hurling the empty liquor bottles, left by the previous occupant, against the wall, shattering them one by one.  Once she had exhausted the stash of bottles within reach, she collapsed onto her knees in a fit of ugly sobs 

Gage let her carry on like that for a few minutes before he’d finally had enough.  He walked across the room and stood over her trembling, crying body.  “When yer done havin’ yer moment of drama, we should talk seriously about how we’re gonna get Nuka World up and running.”  He nudged her with one of his spiked boots.  “I’m gonna go ahead and say yer done, now.”

Opal gasped, her body still shuddering.  She wiped her tears with the back of her right hand and attempted to control her breathing.  She swallowed and spluttered for a moment or two more, then rose and sat upon the damaged bar stool.  “Fine,” she sighed.  “Get me a glass of wine, and we can talk business.”  Her headache was coming back and she wanted something to just calm her nerves.  She closed her eyes and began massaging her temples. 

Gage plunked a Nuka World souvenir mug onto the bar and sloshed some wine into it.  “You seem to have broken most of the glasses…boss,” he added, carefully.

“It’s a cup, it’ll do,” Opal snapped in response.  She sipped the wine and took a deep breath.  Gage produced one of the park maps, in all of its pre-war drawn, cartoony glory.

“Look.  This here is Nuka Town USA, where we’re all crammed in together right now.  The rest of the areas of the park are occupied with wildlife, or worse, but shouldn’t be a major problem for anyone tryin’ to stay alive and clear them out, you understand?” 

Opal nodded and took another gulp of her wine.  She and Gage spent the rest of the day going over strategy and tactics on how to sweep out the rest of the park for raider occupation.  She couldn’t help but find herself glancing towards the elevator now and then.

By sundown, she and Gage had established a decent plan for the coming weeks on how to clear out the rest of the park.  Based on scouting reports, each of the parks was wrought with some kind of danger, whether it be crazed robots, mutated monsters, or just plain heavy radiation and painted ghouls.  Opal eventually found herself tuning out Gage’s deep, raspy voice, and staring at the elevator and beyond, to the horizon.

Gage gently poked her on the shoulder.  “He’ll be back, boss.  Let’s just worry about the park and deal with him when the time comes.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“We’ve both traveled the wasteland – me, longer than he has, obviously – but there’s no question that a woman like you is one of a kind.  He’ll be back, or he’s truly the stupid one.”  Gage retreated to the door to the interior of the mountain.  “Get some rest, boss.  I’ll come get you in the morning.”

“Right.”  Opal upended the last wine bottle and watched a dribble drip off its lip and into her mug.  She frowned and set the bottle back onto the bar with a loud clank.  She looked around the room and saw the radio in the corner.  She clicked it on and immediately regretted it.

“Well, I’m just about to sign off for the night and leave a playback loop of yours truly for your late evening listening or screwing pleasure, but before I do that, here’s a recap of today’s top story: new overboss just as unmotivated as the last one, it seems.  She’s spent three whole fucking days picking her ass up there in the Fizztop Grille and we have yet to see any indication she is at all interested, let alone serious, about helping us out here in Nuka World.  What a bitch, eh?  Well, tomorrow’s another day, I guess!  This is Red Eye, signing off.”

Opal found herself growling before she clicked the radio back off.  Her mind swirled with several thoughts and feelings.  The strategic meeting with Gage had distracted her off MacCready’s departure well enough, but the thirty seconds she gave to Red Eye caused a separate flurry of problems to scurry through her brain.  Gage made it seem like all she had to do was muscle her way through the different parks and claim them for the gangs, and they’d pay her back with loyalty and respect.  The radio, though, made it seem like the task was far steeper uphill than that. 

_Oh God, Mac, what if you were right?  What if I’m being set up?_

The thought of MacCready sent another wave of sadness through her body.  Rather than succumb to the urge to start crying once more, she instead decided to climb into the bed, clamp her eyes shut, and try to go to sleep. It was no use.  She tossed and turned for hours, dozing off here and there, but unable to rest at all.  Finally, in the early hours of the morning, she sat up and checked the time on her Pip Boy. It was shortly after 2 AM.  Opal took a breath and got out of the bed to rummage around some more in the liquor cabinet.  All that was left was some hard liquor and a piss warm Nuka Cola.

_I guess it’s a sign to turf the substances, for now._  She picked up a bottle of water, instead, and flopped into a chair next to the elevator.  The night wind felt cool and like a gentle caress against her cheeks. Her jaw remained bruised and a little tender from her fight with Colter, but the swelling had gone down completely. Reflexively, she reached up to touch her face while she had thought about it.

Opal gazed down to the stagnant water that remained captive in what had likely been a large fountain of sorts.  The decrepit paddle boats off to the side indicate the man-made body of water had been constructed as an attraction, all that time ago.  All that remained was an oily, smelly pond.  Her eyes traced imaginary lines between the pinhole-sized points of starlight reflected on the still water while she listened to the sounds of the barrel fires crackling along the pathways below and the jovial, boisterous shouts of raiders partying into the late night.

The creak and whine of the cable and pulley on the elevator jerked her awake.  Opal hadn’t realized she had dozed off and checked her Pip Boy, but it was merely 2:30 AM.  She wondered who would dare come up to her quarters so late at night, uninvited, when her eyes widened and her breath caught in her throat.

_Mac!  Of course! He’s come back, after all!_

Opal stepped away from the elevator, quickly trying to decide how to play it out.  She didn’t want to appear too happy and make his ego even bigger, but if she acted too indifferent, he might take that too harshly. The elevator was getting closer. She shifted from foot to foot and remained entirely unable to decide what to do and thought she’d just follow his lead.

It was instantly apparent that the man standing on the elevator was most certainly not MacCready. He was decked out in a bird mask and all the other associated plumage expected from a member of the Pack.  Opal was immediately disappointed and aggravated. The man leapt off the elevator and skid to a stop once he saw Opal standing there.

“O-oh!  Overboss!  I, uh, I didn’t expect to see you, there,” he stammered.

“You didn’t think I’d be here in my…home?”

“Right right right right, of course, I meant, like, right there, at the elevator, like right now, like –“

“What are you doing here?” she interrupted, firmly.  The man was clearly high as anything and Opal suspected he’d come up as part of a dare, or to rob her, or both.

“It’s actually, it’s uh, it’s kind of bad, is Gage around?  I thought he was here somewhere, too?”

“I’m here, dipshit,” Gage growled from behind her.  Opal turned to see him standing there without his armour on.  The moonlight glinted off the steel of his gun.  “The fuck are you babbling about?  You’ve got ten seconds before I blow yer head off for tresspassin’ into the boss’ apartment to make sure no one else follows your mistake.”

“How did you –“ Opal began. Gage anticipated her question and interrupted.

“I’m a light sleeper, boss. I hear everything.  Now,” Gage gestured towards the intruder with his gun, “you got only five seconds.”

The gang member waved his hands in front of him, his words spilling out in a babbling flood.  “No no no no no don’t oh my God oh my God Gage don’t shoot someone killed Nisha she’s dead someone shot her oh God oh God.”  He fell to his knees and cradled his head with his arms.

Gage glanced at Opal and looked back at the Pack flunky.  He nudged him with the barrel of his gun.  “Exactly how many chems are you on right now?  No one would be ballsy enough to murder a gang leader, not with the way things are.”

“W-w-w-w-w-well it’s true, the Disciples were having some kind of weird party, I think they called it a bloodletting?  Well my friend and I were just spyin’ on them to see what those freaks were up to. Nisha had come down to the main level and was sayin’ a bunch of shit about…blood…and spilling blood…God man I don’t really know, we were just hidden there and gettin’ high and BOOM!”  He burst his hands out to emphasize the retelling. “She’s holding her neck and falling down and bleeding, and no one sees anything else, and the Disciples all start freaking the fuck out and we just got out of there and I came straight here.” 

As if on cue, on the far side of the pond, a group of Disciples led by the distinctive figure of Savoy were shrieking and calling for the blood of the Operators.  Opal’s eyes widened at the sight.  “Jesus,” she breathed, “they’re going to start a war.”

“Shit,” Gage cursed.  “We need a new plan.  Now.” 

The door to the interior of the mountain banged open behind them.  All three turned to look towards the sound.  MacCready stood there, swaying under the heavy influence of several hours of alcohol consumption.  “Opal. Ish allll inshane out there.  Shomeone killed Nisha, they think the Operators did it, they’re gonna tear the plashe apart.”  His slurring was nearly incomprehensible, and he could barely stand. MacCready stumbled towards the nearest bar stool but tumbled before he could sit down.

“Oh, for the love of —“ Gage’s voice choked out, suddenly. Opal turned to look back at him to see the Pack member had plunged a bowie knife into Gage’s throat.  Gage twitched and gagged, falling heavily onto the floor, splayed out onto his back.  The Pack stepped back to the edge of the elevator and cupped his hands to his mouth. He let out some sort of ululating animal call.  The response came from the far side of the pond.

Time seemed to slow for a moment while Opal’s mind churned through what was really happening.  The hit on Nisha, and the messenger-assassin sent to dispatch Gage, reeked of an orchestrated coup.   _If you think they’re going to leave you be because you were designated useless by some idiot on the radio, think again._  Emboldened by her realization and fear alike, she rushed the Pack member standing at the edge of the elevator.  In a fluid movement, she grabbed a handful of his disgusting hair and the back of his britches to swing him head first over the rail.  He shrieked, helpless, and flailed as he fell to the ground.  Opal didn’t stay to watch him land and knelt next to Gage.

“Poor bastard,” she said softly.  Opal reached down to close his eye, then pulled the knife from his neck.  She hopped up to where the rest of her things had been stashed and zipped into her leather one-piece as quickly as she could. MacCready had managed to claw his way behind the bar to a sink and was retching into the drain.  Opal packed her things into the bag they shared once more and slung it across her back.

MacCready was panting, leaning against the counter, his body shaking.  “We…need…to get out…of here.”

“Uh, yeah.  About that,” she replied, as MacCready flung his face back into the sink to throw up.  She took a breath and scanned around the room.  Opal hoped that by tossing the assassin off the elevator, it bought them some time.  He was so quick to announce he had killed Gage, she suspected that had been his prime objective.  She quickly dashed to the interior of the mountain and began rummaging through Gage’s collection of ammunition.  She returned with a frag mine in each hand.  Opal set the mines and carefully balanced each one to sit halfway off the side edges of the elevator, and then sent it back down to the ground.   “There goes nothing.”  She turned, stepped over Gage’s body one last time, and made to retrieve MacCready.  “Here,” she said, handing him a bottle of water.  “Get some of that in you.  We gotta take the other way down.”

MacCready swirled the water around his mouth, spit, then took a drink.  Opal waved him to follow, but he raised a finger, breathing slowly. He doubled over again, throwing up for the fourth time. 

“Oh, Mac,” Opal groaned. “We don’t have time for this.” She stepped behind the bar and ripped through all the shelves and cupboards.  Finally, she found an ancient ice bucket.  Just as she was thrusting it into his pale hands, the mines she had left on the elevator exploded as they hit the ground.

“Didjoo do that?” MacCready slurred.

“Yes, Mac, I did that. Time to go.  Bring your bucket.  Come on!”  Opal took him by the arm and pulled him urgently towards the door to the interior, through Gage’s old quarters, and to the interior elevator.  The two stared at each other as the elevator made its way down to the ground floor.  MacCready, while leaning against the wall, still swayed on his feet.  “Dear God, man, what did you do to yourself?” Opal’s tone was a mixture of compassion and disgust.

“I…I think I shtopped counting after the third beer and seven…or eighth…shot of vodka…?”  MacCready’s guts made an audible churn and he clutched his stomach.  “I can’t talk about this right now.”  He had hardly managed to finish his sentence when he was losing his stomach contents into the dusty bucket.   

“I assure you, we will be talking about this later,” Opal agreed.  The elevator chimed as they stopped moving.  “Here we go.”  The doors opened, but the room was empty.  Opal had half expected a party of Pack assassins to be waiting for them.  She wasn’t about to wait for one to show up. “Mac, come on, now,” she hissed, taking him by the arm again. 

MacCready yanked his elbow out of her grip.  “I’m comin’ already, sssstop pulling me, where’d that water go?  How many couches’re even in this room?”

Opal felt like she’d been punched in the gut.  MacCready was not going to be the infallible pair of eyes she’d come to expect him to be. The thought of having to get them both out of the park safely on her own was enough to make her consider throwing up, herself.

_You’ve got this.  Creep through the shadows, avoid the fighting.  Take the alternate route out of the park.  Camp out in the outer grounds until things cool off.  Something.  Anything._

She swallowed the lump in her throat and silently approached the door to the outside.  Opal pulled it open as slowly as possible and peered out. Her ears strained to listen for any sound of movement nearby.  All she picked up was the battling at the Parlour.  Another group of screaming Disciples passed the far side of the pond towards the fight.  It would seem that the gangs were far more occupied with destroying each other, than pursuing her.

Opal wasn’t willing to risk waiting around to find out.  She pushed the door open completely and motioned for MacCready to follow.  “Just put that down, you don’t need it.  If you puke out there, it’ll just blend in with the other piles of junkie puke.”

“Ugh, this place is just the worst,” he groaned, setting the bucket onto the nearby desk.

They broke out and crept along the base of the fake mountain and around the corner, completely avoiding going towards the Disciples’ nest or further in to Nuka Town USA and the rest of the fighting.  MacCready was fully overcompensating for his condition, moving very slowly and placing each step deliberately.  They hid in the shadow of the mountain cast in the moonlight, making their way down the cobblestone path and keeping their bodies close to the ruined attraction booths. Opal stumbled over the cold corpse of a Disciple that had died of an overdose, her face lying in a puddle of her own vomit.   _I’ve met my vomit quota for the month, for sure._  

Finally, they stood, huddled next to an archway with the metered gate leading into the park.  Opal stretched her neck out as far as she could and peered into the darkness on each side.  She could neither see nor hear anything.  She exhaled, then led MacCready past the archway and back along the path that circled around the mountain.

She had just turned to say something encouraging to MacCready, when Opal suddenly ploughed into something hard, and warm.  She stumbled backwards and saw she had walked right into a pack member in dark, robed camouflage.  He grinned, his teeth appearing bright against the dark boar’s mask he wore over his face.

“Well, well, well,” he cooed.  “The hen has finally fled the roost.  Didn’t you want to stay and find out what would be left of the park for you, once the Pack took it?”

Opal swallowed. MacCready hung behind, no longer swaying as badly as before, but still in no condition to defend himself in a violent confrontation.  Sweat ran down the back of her neck.  “Listen. I don’t give a shit about your gangs or your war.  Just let us pass.  No one has to know you saw us.”

“Clearly you haven’t lived in Raider-ville for very long.  That’s not exactly how we do things.”  The man pulled a pistol out of his belt.  The metal on it was dark and seemed to absorb the moonlight, rather than reflect it.

Opal tensed.  Her heart rate started to rise inside her chest, and she clenched her fists open and shut.  She glanced back towards MacCready and had to do a double take:  he was leaning against his sniper rifle, resting his head on his arm.  “Mac!” she hissed.

MacCready’s head bobbed up. “…not in the brochure,” he mumbled, then yawned.  He put his head back onto his arm. 

“Looks like lover boy should have stopped at vodka number five,” the man snorted.

Opal’s eyes narrowed. “Did you plan this?  Did you get him drunk, then start the gang war?  Who are you?”

“I’m to Mason, what Gage had been to you.  Only, instead of being useless, like Gage, I actually pulled the strings to get things done.”  The man pointed the pistol directly at Opal’s chest.  “I think I’ll turn your adorable little nose into a necklace.”

_Here we go, I guess._  In a sudden move, Opal ducked and punched the man on his right kneecap.  He flinched, but didn’t buckle, though he did slightly soften his aim.  She drew the bowie knife and swung it clumsily as she stood up, cutting into his left wrist.  The man grunted, then retaliated by swinging the gun and hitting her in the face.

_Good, now I‘ll have matching bruises._  She anticipated his shot and took a dramatic step out of the way to her right.  As expected, he squeezed out a round that flew past and behind her, and made contact with a cobblestone some ways away.  The low light, and his dark clothing, made it tricky to see where to swing, and Opal couldn’t be bothered to even attempt to strategize.  She started thrusting the knife at the man wildly, slicing up his robes, jabbing more frantically with every thrust that met fabric and not flesh. The man compensated by stepping and hopping backwards to avoid the knife.  It was enough to keep her from hitting anything vital and from him to get any steady shot.

The thunder-like crack of MacCready’s sniper rifle filled Opal’s ears.  The bullet grazed the top of her left thigh, and she stopped cold. The man in the mask grinned again and swung his arm around to aim his pistol at Opal once more.  Opal stepped towards him and swung her knife, causing the man to jerk his body out of the way.

MacCready’s gun fired again, boring a perfect hole through the man’s robe.  

“Mac,” Opal cried, trying to sound sweet and not frantic, “you’re not exactly in the best condition to be operating a firearm!”

“’s’fine, I know what’m doing.”  He had sprawled out onto his belly and was aiming his rifle in the direction of the fight.

_He’s gonna kill us both, the drunken idiot._  “Mac, DON’T – augh,” she cried out, interrupted by the butt of the man’s pistol making contact into the side of her head.  Opal was thrown off balance, stumbled sideways, and landed square onto her backside.  The man stood over her, grinning.  Blood from his cut wrist dripped onto her leg.  Opal shuddered.  She drew her knees up and began kicking her heels into his shins.  The man took quick aim to her left shin and fired off two rounds. Both bullets ripped through her leg, one narrowly missing bone.  Opal screamed, the pain a combination of ripping and burning.  Sweat flowed freely down her face.

“Aww, it’s wounded, now. You know what we do with a lame animal, right?”  The man seemed to be purring.  He brought the pistol up to his mouth and licked down the barrel with his tongue. Opal felt like she was going to be sick. Her pulse thudded loudly in her temples. She shifted slightly, bracing herself for the death blow, when her hand brushed the hilt of the knife.

“It’s too bad, really. We should have recruited you for the Pack.  You’re actually pretty decent in a scrap.”

She panted, hoping not to draw attention to the fact she still had her hand on the knife.  “Push off your mask.  I want to see the face of the man who would kill me.”

MacCready fired another shot.  It missed completely and whizzed through the gap between Opal and the man in the mask.   They both ignored him.

He seemed to pause. “Not an unreasonable request. After all, you’re the Overboss.” He pushed the mask up to reveal a painted face, but more importantly, unprotected eyes.

_Luck, don’t fail me, now._  In an unnatural movement, Opal swung the knife up behind her head, then threw it with all her concentration and strength towards the man’s face.  She had aimed for his left eye, but it stuck instead into his right brow.  She was briefly reminded of lumberjacks and what an axe looked like when it was embedded in some wood. 

The man shrieked, a shrill, animalistic, high pitched sound.  He dropped his pistol and staggered backwards a step or two, before falling onto his backside while flailing his hands over his face.  Opal scrambled up as best she could with her wounded leg pulsing in pain, snatched the fallen pistol, and unloaded the clip into the man’s body.  He lay there, dead, and twitching, bleeding onto the ancient cobblestones.  Opal fell to her hands and knees, trembling, as the adrenaline began to cycle down through her body.  

MacCready lumbered up next to her.  “We got ‘im, eh, babe?  S’ee’s dead.”

His slurred speech snapped Opal back to their reality.  The sounds of the fighting within the Nuka Town seemed to be slowing down as the battle began to peter out.  Any survivors would be falling back to regroup.  Opal did not want to be found if a search party decided to sweep the area. “Yeah,” she croaked, “dead as a doornail.”  She pushed herself up onto her feet, cringing at the pain of putting weight on her left side. _Gotta power through it, for now.  Mac can barely keep his own head up._

“Le’ss go, O.  I’m really tired.  I really wan-go-sleep.  Can we just go sleep?”

Opal hooked her arm into MacCready’s and hoped he’d just see it as an endearing gesture, rather than a necessity at that moment.  “We gotta walk a bit, away from here.  Leave them to their gang war.  Come on.” She began to pull him east, past the mountain, and as far into the grounds as she could.   

They hobbled through the dead fields for nearly an hour.  Opal was starting to lose steam, and fast.  MacCready, slowly sobering up, wanted nothing more than to just pass out and sleep the rest of it off.  They drew up to, by all appearances, an abandoned campsite.  It was difficult to tell in the low light how much dust was on all the features, but the clock on the Pip Boy indicated it was after 4 AM and Opal figured it was a safe enough bet that the owner would have come back to camp by then.

MacCready had tossed himself onto the sleeping bag and was already snoring.  She sat down next to him, wondering what to do about her leg. She was shot at close range and imagined the bullets would have passed right through.

_Fuck._  Her stomach turned at the very thought of what kind of damage two bullets could have done to her leg, even if they weren’t still inside her flesh.  She swallowed her nausea and dug through their bag for something, anything, antiseptic.

She came upon half a bottle of bourbon.  She inhaled deeply through her nostrils, popped the bottle open, and poured the liquor as slowly as she could all over where it hurt the most.  Opal couldn’t bear the thought of turning on her Pip Boy light to see any details, barely holding herself together by that point as it was.  She just poured until her leg was stinging all over, and soaked.  She exhaled in a grunt, having been holding her breath without realizing it.

Opal laid back next to MacCready, a cold sweat all over her skin.  She closed her eyes and let her body succumb to shock.


	7. EPILOGUE

MacCready ducked into the decrepit shack and out of the pouring rain.  It had been four days since he and Opal had dragged themselves off the Nuka World main park grounds and back into the wasteland, slowly making their return towards the Boston area.  The day immediately after their escape had been rough for both of them: her, with her crudely bandaged and severely injured leg, and him in the throes of a wicked hangover.  Neither cared to see if the warring raiders ended up levelling the place as it stood and moved out as fast as their afflictions would allow.

He opened his duster and pulled out the food and supplies he had dug out from some other housing ruins down the destroyed road, then took his hat off and shook it out.  “Lousy rain,” he muttered, putting it back onto his head.

Opal was propped up in the far corner, elevating her leg and sipping on some water.  “Successful run, though?”  She knew how much he hated getting wet and hoped giving him opportunity to brag would distract him from his misery.

“Pretty good.  I’ll have to go back when it stops raining, I couldn’t carry everything, and I hoped to avoid the worst of the weather.”  He tossed her a ripe mutfruit.

She caught it and set it down beside her.  Opal rotated the fruit idly on the table while she listened to the rain hitting the outside of the wall next to her.  MacCready knelt in front of her, a mutfruit between his teeth, and began unwrapping her leg.  He tossed the dirty t-shirt aside, then raised his hand to take a bite from his fruit, proper.  “Uh foun’ some anny-bye-aw-dic –“

“Mac,” she interrupted, holding up a hand to shield her view, “just chew and swallow, then talk.  That’s so gross.”

“Sorry,” he grinned, not sorry at all.  “I was saying, I found this medical cream that should help with the pain and keep the infection away.  ‘Antibiotic ointment.’”  MacCready dispensed a generous glob of the green-tinted goo and began to spread it all around her wounded calf.  Opal hissed in a breath, then released it as a sigh of relief.

“Oh, that is _good,_ ” she purred.

“Only the best for the Overboss,” he winked, taking another bite of his fruit.

 _Never gonna live that one down._  Opal leaned her head against the wall and said nothing more, as MacCready finished slathering her down and binding her back up.  His task completed, he perched himself next to her, chewing quietly.

“What are we doing here, Mac?” she asked, seemingly out of nowhere.

“Huh?  Like, right now?”

“No, like, in general.  What were we thinking, all this time, risking our own necks for a handful of caps here and there?”

MacCready reached up and rubbed his brow with the back of his hand.  “What, you thinking it’s time to change careers?  Run with some caravans?  Start our own gang?”

“Kind of.”  Opal sat upright and resumed fidgeting with her fruit.  “What if, instead of a gang, we established something like…a club.  Sort of like a guild, of sorts.  With membership fees.”

“A guild of what?”

“Mercenaries.”

“ _Mercenaries_?” MacCready repeated.  “No way, O.  I don’t want to have our own brand of Gunners.  The competition is not worth it, and we’d definitely never make any money.”

“Not like that.  We get freelancers, like how we were, to pay a membership fee to join up.  Between your smarts, and my charm, we pick up contracts like clearing out neighbourhoods for settlements or just plain old mutant bashing.  But instead of us paying the mercs, they pay _us_ for the contract, instead.”

“Interesting.  Contract goes to the highest bidder.”  He crossed his arms, and nodded in thought.  “What’s the gain for the merc, though?”

Opal’s eyes twinkled.  “That’s just it.  They keep whatever they loot out from the job, and maybe a portion of the contract buy in gets paid back, but the real gain is status.  Bragging rights.  It’s not really about the job, at all.”  She gesticulated, for emphasis.  “We’re not talking about piecemeal, ‘my neighbour pissed me off so I want him dead,’ kinds of jobs.  We’re talking about jobs like those posted in the Dugout, like ‘kill the raiders at the Mass Pike Tunnel’ – but with a twist, like, ‘within twenty four hours.’  Mercs bid on the contract, and the rest place bets on the outcome.  And don’t forget, they pay a fee just to get in the door, to even see what jobs we’ve got.”

“We set up a little trading stand, maybe a bar, and some beds…”  MacCready’s voice drifted off as his imagination took hold.  Opal imagined he could hear the sound of hundreds, maybe thousands, of bottle caps, pinging onto the floor.  “Yeah,” he finally added.  “Some of the details would have to be ironed out, but it could work.  This could really work.”

“Whenever you get the itch, you can bid on a contract yourself and see how well you do,” Opal smirked.

“I’d win.”

“You’ll have to prove it.”

MacCready sighed, a sound of contentment.  He chucked his fruit core across the room and into the rubble on the far side.  “What should we call it?”

“Something ridiculous, that’s also amazing.  Like, ‘Guild of Greatness.’”

“No, that’s all bad.  What if we named it after some of my favourite comics?  ‘Unstoppables Club.’”

Opal shook her head.  “I don’t think that describes it too well.  Private membership, exclusive hit contracts, accommodations – “

“I’ve got it!” MacCready interrupted, snapping his fingers.  “’The Mayors of the Wastes.’  Or, uh, just ‘The Mayors,’ for short.  The top of the line, best at the game.  Instead of being mayor of some pile of dirt settlement, why not the mayor of the whole world?”

She thought about it for a second, then chuckled.  “I like it.  You’re either the best, or you don’t belong.  The Gunners, even the Brotherhood, have rookies.  We won’t.”

“And they’ll never know we’re really just making money off _them_ getting shot in the leg.”

“This is brilliant.  We’ve been wasting our time.”

MacCready grinned, then pulled his hat off his head and tossed it away beside him.  “Talking’s done,” he concluded, then pounced.

THE END!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the works, to follow: Gunsmoke and Blades 2, Old Embers, New Flames!


End file.
